


The Ex

by CaptainDude (HandbagMurder)



Category: South Park
Genre: Angst, Breaking Up & Making Up, Canon Compliant, F/M, Feelings and stuff, Frottage, High School AU, Kissing, M/M, Mentions of Heterosexuallity, Pining, Post Season 19, Puberty, Sexual Tension, Smoking, Tears, Teenaged Shenanigans, Therapy, alcohol use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2017-09-21
Packaged: 2018-05-09 06:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5528744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandbagMurder/pseuds/CaptainDude
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been years since Craig broke up with Tweek – Plenty of time for both of them to have moved on with their lives. But as Craig grows older and more disillusioned with the world he finds himself in, he begins to wonder if love is something that will remain in the past.  </p><p>M, will be E.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. NEWSPRINT

**Author's Note:**

> _I guess I got a heart with your name on it_   
>  _I can’t get away from it, no matter what I do._   
>  _I should be single while I’m young,_   
>  _Hooking up and having fun,_   
>  _But I keep coming back to you._

Craig Tucker sat in the empty waiting room, picking his nails and studying the covers of the magazines on the table in front of him. Unsurprisingly, none of the titles on offer were piquing his interest. The subject matter covered ranged from dull to decidedly clinical - _Good Health Annual_ and _Bird Spotters Diary_ were precisely the kinds of subject which wouldn’t be offensive to the mentally or emotionally sensitive, and so Craig supposed it made sense that they would be the kinds of text provided. He considered, briefly, lodging a complaint when the opportunity was presented, but then decided that he particulars of how the South Park Psychological Wellness Institute was run was no business of his.

Regrettably, there was scarce entertainment to be found in looking around the waiting room either. White walls and fluorescent lighting, punctuated with framed photographs of flowers and mountainous landscapes, reminded Craig of everything he _didn’t_ find exciting or pleasant in a space. The water cooler standing in the corner had the unfortunate habit of gurgling occasionally, keeping him from dozing off even though he was trying very hard to do so. His appointment had been due to start fifteen minutes ago. What the hell was even keeping them? There wasn’t anyone else in the waiting room, so surely it wasn’t like they were busy with clients or anything?

Craig craned his neck to check the wall clock above reception. It told him the time was three seventeen. The receptionist had left her post at quarter two, and hadn’t yet come back.

He glanced at his watch, to make sure the reception clock wasn’t running too quickly, and found that in fact it was running _late_ \- His watch said that it was half past three, and exasperated he pulled his phone out of his pocket to check it even though he knew already the battery was dead.

Jesus Christ. Was this going to be how it was _every_ time?                 

Craig was considering just plain getting up and leaving when the door next to reception swung open, and a short, exhausted looking little woman hobbled out. Craig had never seen her before, but even so he could tell that the colour in her cheeks was not usual. The redness around her eyes indicated that she had, more likely than not, just stopped crying. He watched her leave the waiting room with a bitter taste on his tongue, and for the first time in _weeks_ he felt a stirring of something akin to resolve inside of him. Stubbornness maybe? Or maybe just good old fashioned resistance to new and unfamiliar situations.

“You must be Craig?”

He turned to look when someone called to him – a habit he had acquired when he was in his infancy and was yet to un-teach himself. Another woman, the one who must have ushered out the teary client moments earlier, was looking at him in a way Craig recognised well. He had been studied enough in his short lifetime to know appraisal when he saw it. That expression of well-meaning judgement that somehow made him feel worse than if he was being judged for the sake of making fun. With slight unease he remembered that he hadn’t showered for several days, and had pulled on whatever clothes he had happened to find on the floor that morning, as he crawled out of bed.

“Yeah?”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Doctor Boswjik. Would you care to step into my office?”

Craig did not. He rolled his eyes and stood up anyway, shuffling through the door into Doctor Boswjik’s office.

The first thing he noticed was that the space seemed a complete inverse of the waiting room decor. With its dark wood accents and sleek leather sofas, it matched the woman in front of him in every regard. She closed the door behind him, and Craig sat down on the couch, studying the elegant furnishings and certificates which (unlike the posters in the waiting room) were successfully attractive additions to the plum coloured walls.

Doctor Boswjik breezed by, and seated herself in the sofa opposite him as though she had done it a thousand times before. Which she probably had. Craig watched her with narrowed eyes as she adjusted her skirt and glasses, before reaching for the polished side table next to her and taking a pad and paper out of the top drawer.

“How are you doing today Craig?” she asked, and Craig stared at her as though he didn’t understand what she was asking.

“What?”

“How are you doing today? Good? Bad? Average?”

Bewildered and a little pissed off, actually. Craig squeezed his hands between his thighs and shrugged.

“Average I guess.”

“Sorry it’s late. My last appointment ran a little over. Its oaky, we will go ‘til four thirty. You’re my last appointment today.”

She wrote something down at the top of the page of pad paper she was holding, and Craig had seen it written enough times to know it was his name. “Today I just want to chat a little and get to know you better. I’ll give you some forms to fill out as well when you go home.”

She smiled coolly, without showing her teeth, and suddenly it occurred to Craig that this woman, with her Gucci readers and tidy black kitten heal shoes, was haughty and much smarter than the average school counsellor. He probably wouldn’t be able to run circles around her like he had Mr Mackey.

He wasn’t all together sure he liked that.

“… Okay?”

“Good. Well, let me just introduce myself a little further. Like I said, my name is Doctor Boswjik, and I am a professional anxiety counsellor and behavioural therapist. I’m twenty nine years old, and I have one pet – an Alaskan Malamute called Dok. I care about him very much.”

She smiled again, the same measured smile, and nodded in his direction.

“Now it’s your turn.”

Her tone made Craig feel somewhat condescended to. He sucked a deep breath in through his nose and shook his head.

“You know who I am.” He reported, and Doctor B arched a finely shaped eyebrow in surprise. “Craig Tucker. Seventeen. My stupid parents made me come here ‘cause they think there’s something wrong with me.”

“Do they?”

“Yes! Duh! What the fuck do you think I _wanted_ to come to this stupid place?” he looked in disgust at the carpet, which was that pretentious cream colour that could never be used in a real house due to the impractical amount of upkeep it would require, and the towering wooden bookshelves along the back wall. The window at the side of the office was open, and Craig could hear the sound of afternoon traffic going by outside.

“Well I don’t know.” The doctor responded, scribbling something down on her notepad. “That’s why I’m asking.”

Craig scoffed, and informed her that his father had been the main one making him attend. The primary reason for this, of course, was that he was a fucker, and he should probably just leave Craig alone.

Doctor B seemed unconvinced. Her pen moved ceaselessly over the pad in a way Craig found quite unsettling. She finished writing her sentence before she looked up at him again, and nodded.

“Okay. Well, I hear what you’re saying, but you know most of the time when parents send their kids to therapy it’s because they are worried about them.”

“Worried about them?”

What a joke. Craig huffed and sunk back into the sofa, wishing he was back out in the waiting room again. “Good one. They shouldn’t be worried about me. I’m _fine_.”

“Are you?”

For a moment, Craig felt his defiance falter. He remembered how ‘fine’ he was that morning eight months ago. That morning he had crawled out of bed at two am and tried to run away from home. The memory was hazy now, a little faded by time and a shift in mood, but surely in the moment he shimmied out his window and hiked through huge drifts of snow across the lawn he wasn’t fine? He had packed a _bag,_ after all. He obviously hadn’t meant to come back. And without even pausing to think about how furious his parents would be, he had left, and he had walked through the snow for _hours_ before anyone even realised he was gone. Trying to recall his reasoning behind that was difficult. It brought a frosty chill back to the tips of his fingers and toes. He had made it to Boulder, but he did think vaguely that he would have liked to keep going further. He would have liked to keep waking to the end of the _world_ before he stopped going, because all he knew for sure was that the further away he got from home, the easier and easier it was for him to breathe.

“Of course I fucking am.” He forced his thoughts far from that subject, breaking their gaze as though making eye contact now would give him away. If he showed even a fractional amount of weakness, he would loose _all_ his secrets and thoughts to this hawkish, horrible woman, and that was something Craig had no intention of doing.

There was no one on earth who could make him feel quite as childish as a mental health professional; the doctor looked at him over her gasses for a moment thoughtfully, and bile rose to the back of Craig’s throat when she bowed her head to scribble something down.

 

…

_It was spring, but the fine weather was wasted on the pair of them sitting in the food court at the mall. Craig was nursing a Diet Coke, chewing on the straw as he watched his company construct a surprisingly complicated edifice using straw wrappers. Tweek’s hands, which usually trembled even at his calmest, were steady as he balanced each thin paper in place. Craig wanted to say something, but he didn’t want to distract him from his work, and so instead he let his eyes wander. Without Craig even having to try and direct them, they managed to find a pair of girls walking across the food court towards the Sushi stand. He watched them idly on their passage, studying the jiggle of small breasts and swish of endless legs in their slim fit jeans. Sights like that… they really made him ponder the mysteries of female skin. Would it be warmer than what he was already familiar with? Softer or more silky than his own? He had never so much as brushed against a girl before, let alone been afforded the privilege of sliding his hand up inside a bra, and at fourteen it really did seem a little late for him. Token and Clyde had been to second base plenty of times. And Craig, as he had been for almost four years, was still awkwardly dating someone he didn’t want to._

_Still uncomfortably stuck in a platonic ‘not-really’ relationship with_ him.

_“Uh, Craig?”_

_Craig jumped, and turned back to Tweek, who had finished his bizarre construction and was now studying Craig across it, with a suspicious little furrow between his brows._

_“Yes. Hello. Hi.”_

_“Are you okay?” His eyes flickered in the direction Craig was looking, and Craig was relieved to see that the girls had moved on. As far as Tweek could tell, he was looking at nothing but empty space, although  he would be lying if he said that some cruel and bitter part of him didn’t wish that Tweek had just caught him checking someone else out. Maybe it would be easier to break up with him then. Maybe he would be more open and receptive to the idea of going back to their own separate lives. Better yet, maybe he would get really angry, and break up with Craig himself. That way Craig wouldn’t have to do it, and if anyone asked_ Tweek _would be the one who looked like the asshole. Although Craig knew from past experience that trying to set Tweek up as the asshole tended to backfire._

 _Craig relented, admitting to himself that most likely, he was just a terrible person who wanted to get back for the years he had wasted trying to convince himself it could work out well. He kind of_ wanted _to hurt his feelings, because by this stage in their relationship Craig was starting to feel pretty let down. Hadn’t Tweek promised him once, when Craig might have believed they could be happy, that they could make this work forever if they worked hard enough? Hadn’t Tweek promised him, that as long as Craig kept being Craig, Tweek would become someone worth dating? Someone able to repay him for everything he has ever done to keep him sane?_

_“Uh, Yah.” He rattled the ice in the bottom of his drink, and Tweek pressed his lips together as though he suspected he may have been lying. A guilty feeling began to bubble up in his stomach, coating his insides like cooling wax. Craig had to blink back tears (Fuck, where had those come from?) and look up at the light fixture to contain himself. The light was some overly complicated modernist thing that had been installed around the time the food court was renovated. It was really pretty ugly, but in truth Craig didn’t even notice._

_He had to tell him. He had to look straight into his buggy, moss-green eyes and tell him. And if he started flushing and spluttering, or pulling at his tangled mess of hair, then that was what it was and Craig would have to steel himself against it. He couldn’t pretend any longer. How could anyone, especially someone as resolutely straight as Craig, find him attractive? He was short and he stood funny. He said weird things, and puberty had not been kind to his complexion or his voice. Craig felt bad for him, and was  fond of all his complexes and quirks, but he was holding him back and reality had come knocking too many times for him to lead the poor boy on any more._

_“Tweek,” he said firmly, swallowing the guilt and forcing himself not to remember the moments he thought that maybe, this boy was beautiful. “we need to talk about something.”_

_And Tweek, being naturally inclined towards panic and mortification, looked terrified – something Craig probably should have expected. But it surprised him, all the same._

 

…

 

Craig sat down at his desk and pulled the plain black A3 planner out of his satchel. He rustled the pages, locating the appointment written in the previous day, and with a very distinct sense of bitterness he struck it out thoroughly in blue biro pen. Clyde moved into his seat beside him as he did it, and gave him a very confused look – as though he hadn’t seen Craig do anything quite so aggressively before right now.

“Alright dude?”

“Fine.” Craig snapped his planner shut and huffed. His pen, dropped unceremoniously on the desk by his elbow, began rolling across the surface of his desk and clattered to the floor. He didn’t notice.

Craig had been thinking about his counselling all morning. Mostly about how, after he had refused point blank to admit there was anything wrong with him, Doctor Boswjik had been happy to just sit there in silence watching him do nothing for the duration of the appointment. Even though initially he had thought that this would be an ideal way to spend the appointment, the reality of the situation was that it was more and more infuriating to him the longer it went on, and likewise it was more and more infuriating the more he thought about it.

Where did she get of, just _where_ did she get off, sitting there and looking at him with those calculating, judgemental eyes? How did she justify her behaviour, not even _trying_ to do her stupid fucking job and fix him? Craig thought bitterly that even if there was nothing worth fixing, it would have been nice if she had made an effort rather than just giving up in the first try. At least Mackey, and everyone else he had seen in the last few years, had always made the futile effort to try.

 _What a waste of money,_ he muttered to himself, stuffing his planner back into his bag. _What a waste of time_. And Craig knew that if he opened his schedule again he would see he still had nine weeks of further appointments still ahead of them – all of them probably spent in silence, staring at each other, and all of them costing money that Craig’s parents could just as easily have spent on him. Actually _on_ him, and goods of the material variety.  

Now the challenge had been extended, Craig decided that he was _not_ going to let that bitch win. There was no way in hell he was going to let her be right about him being troubled. If she thought she could cold shoulder her way to cracking him, she had another think coming. The very notion was so obscene it was making his blood hot in his veins.

He needed to distract himself promptly. If he didn’t, he felt like he might just smash something. As nice as it was to feel rage again, it probably wasn’t all that productive in his school life, and if he got sent home for starting a scene in a class again his parents would have even more reason to think him insane.

He looked around the classroom instead, trying to spot Token or Jimmy of someone else he didn’t completely hate, but found only Kenny leaning back in his seat like a cocky piece of shit and chatting up the small clutch of girls hanging around his desk. His gaze lingered on Kyle, quickly amending his homework before handing it in, and Craig remembered that the class had been given a worksheet yesterday – something he had totally forgotten in the haste of getting to his appointment before it had begun. Not that it had ultimately mattered.

His eyes swept to Wendy then, sitting under the window alone, and it took him a moment to recognise her because a few days ago, Wendy had gotten a haircut. Her short black crop looked good, and Craig suspected he probably wasn’t the only one who thought that it accentuated her long neck and slim shoulders, but Craig couldn’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia for her longer locks because honestly, her hair had been the best part of her on that one occasion. The single, drunken time they had hooked up during an end of class party. It had felt way better to Craig than the emptiness that came after fucking her, and remembering the texture and smell was far superior to remembering lying in bed afterwards, underwhelmed and wondering if he had just been used. Had Wendy had only wanted to bang him because he was there? Maybe she had.

That was her decision. And Craig had been the one who said yes. Before it happened, he had definitely wanted it, and even if it hadn’t been how he imagined it was certainly better than a fugitive jerk in the shower. Maybe he should just learn to be grateful for what he had had, even if what he had had filled him with nothing. This was hardly a new development – when he wasn’t pissed off, almost everything he did filled him with nothing these days. No satisfaction. No excitement. No pleasure. Just nothing, like a big old void inside his belly. He tried not to think about it, but sometimes he let his guard down. It was a rather private quality in himself which he did intended to work on in the future.

He looked to the door just in time to spot Bebe coming through, chatting cheerfully to a towering and well shaped boy who wore a zigzag band to hold his hair off his face. Looking at them was even worse than looking at Wendy – immediately he turned to Clyde, and asked him if he had managed to do the worksheet. Clyde was just telling him to fuck off as the pair approached them, and Bebe leaned down to give Clyde a chaste kiss on the crown of his head.

“Okay if we sit?” she asked them, gesturing to the empty chairs in front of their desks. Clyde said yes, and Craig sniffed as though he was indifferent to what they wanted to do.

“Bebe, did you do the worksheet?”

He forced himself not to look at Tweek sitting next to her, not even out of the corner of his eye. Bebe answered in the affirmative, and beside her Tweek fumbled an exercise book and pencil sleeve onto the desk top.

Puberty _had_ been good to him, ultimately. Much nicer than it had been to Craig or Clyde. Usually, it was easy for Craig to block him out - to pretend he didn’t notice his smooth bow lips or the shy freckles that embellished the sleek angles of his cheeks - but today for some reason he felt a little sensitive, and he couldn’t even issue the polite acknowledgement he had worked himself up to offering over the years. This probably seemed suspicious, because even after breaking up they had remained in the same social circles, and Craig supposed he would _usually_ describe their current relationship as ‘not entirely on bad terms’, even if Tweek was a little weird about it..

“Can I borrow it?” Craig asked her, and Bebe’s lips quirked in a manner he found smug, and unhelpful.

“Fuck off, Craig.”

She was almost an exact echo of Clyde. Craig was on the verge of flipping her off and just giving up when Tweek cleared his throat quietly, and passed his own grubby and folded worksheet his way.

“Borrow mine.” He invited, his tone indicating that it was a gesture of awkward civility rather than genuine care for Craig’s wellbeing. Tweek had always been like that around him since they broke up though. Robotic and perfectly polite. It was unnerving, and even a little insulting, although Craig was hardly in a position to decline.

He thanked him, sounding equally rigid in his reply, and quickly noted down the gist of Tweek’s answers.

He hoped against experience as he handed them back that Tweek had gotten at least some of them right.

 

…

 

Dinnertime in the Tucker household was always the _worst_.

Not that Craig had all that much to compare it too.

Usually it consisted of two courses and an argument, and thank God usually that argument was usually between his parents and his sister. Sometimes, however, Ruby didn’t have very much to say, and that meant that regrettably, the task of instigating a spirited debate fell upon him.

This wasn’t particularly difficult. For the past few months, Craig could hardly even _look_ at his parents without being filled with a sense of disgust and, on a deeper level than maybe he even realised, fear. Stranded in the middle of their forties, working average jobs with a pair of children and no exciting plans for the future, his parents were hardly the sort of people Craig wanted to look up to. As far as he was concerned, their lives were pointless, and devoid of joy. They were pretty much the reason why Craig had given up on his dreams, and there were times he woke up in a cold sweat thinking

_What if I wake up one day and I’m them?_

“Okay Craig,” his mother told him, as he finished explaining his project for physics class over meatloaf. “That sounds quite challenging. But you still haven’t answered our question.”

“What question?” he asked, even though he knew exactly what question he hadn’t answered.

“How was your appointment yesterday? Your father and I have hardly seen you since then.”

And this was true. Very true. And Craig wanted to tell her there was a reason for that, ( _I don’t want to see you_ ) but instead he decided to say something safer. He said:

“Awful. A complete fucking waste of time. Thanks for asking.”

And this set his father right off.

The argument caused tears on his mother’s part, and Ruby was shortly expelled from the room for laughing when Craig started to sniffle as well. When, after fifteen minutes, Craig realised he wasn’t going to win, he ended the confrontation by flipping them off and storming upstairs, locking himself in his bedroom before stalking to the window on the far wall. Outside, darkness had fallen, and the cold in the air had frozen on the windowpane so tiny ice crystals were forming on the bottom of the glass. Craig paused for a moment, trying to control his leg numbing rage, and forced himself to focus on looking at these forms, studying each elegant detail in the fingers which webbed across the pane in glittering silence. The longer he stared at them, the more his breathing calmed, and suddenly finding himself flushed hot and slightly dizzy he fumbled to open the window and slide it upwards, letting a rush of cold air inside.

The streetlights glistened, like they were beckoning to him, and without even noticing he was doing it Craig thought about leaving again. About the immediately possible act of climbing out his window, sliding down the drainpipe, and walking away. Maybe if he did his parents would eventually forget him. Leave him to roam the streets like a homeless ghost, and render him non-accountable to anyone. Maybe, once he was gone his friends would stop seeing him like he was like one of them. Like he was happy, and comfortable, and didn’t lie awake thinking about the impossibly short and incomprehensibly meaningless microcosm of his life.

 _Where would I go_?

He asked himself. But he didn’t know. He didn’t really think that he cared. Anywhere but here was good enough – anywhere he didn’t have to be Craig, who woke up every morning miserable because he had to fight his way through another mediocre and pointless day. Anywhere he could be someone else, and see something different, and he didn’t have to face the knowledge that he still had sixty more years of this, every day. Getting up and being himself, a man in a small town in Colorado, who was never happy with what he had and yet never really wanted a _nything_ badly enough to make an effort to change it.

He had _nowhere_ to go, and even if he did leave then there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t still feel the same. He would still be Craig in a different place, and what was Craig anyway? Just emptiness? Craig wasn’t sure, and he didn’t like trying to figure it out.

Suddenly, he became aware that he felt light headed, and that his chest felt tighter than it had when he first came up stairs. This realisation made his breathing even more difficult, and aching in his lungs and his belly Craig leaned out the window and attempted to swallow great mouthfuls of the night, keeping grip on the windowsill beneath his hands and trying to focus on the feeling of carpet underneath his feet. The frame felt a little wobbly, like his arms and his legs and guts, and inside his chest he felt the hollowness spreading, swallowing everything and eclipsing the voice inside that told him to stop being so goddamned stupid. He was okay. He wasn’t _dying_. He was fine, just like he had always been fine up until right now.

Craig had never felt less fine in his life.

The worst part was that he always forgot how bad ‘not fine’ was until he was in it.    

 


	2. LIQUOR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i should mention that this chapter contains alcohol use, implied heterosexual activities, and cigarette smoking. heads up!

The week passed so slowly it was almost intolerable. Craig couldn’t wait for it to be over, even though he had nothing to look forward to at the end. By far the worst of it was the fact that despite being tired pretty much all the time, Craig found himself absolutely unable to sleep. Restless hours spent staring at his ceiling through the dark doubled the amount of time Craig had to fill with something, but lacking in something to fill them with Craig found himself doing nothing on almost a twenty four hour basis. The closest he came to breaking the monotony was when he dozed off in the middle of history class, and earned a weeks detention and a note home to his parents for doing so.

On Thursday afternoon, exhausted to his bones and nursing a pounding headache, Craig was forcibly dragged back too the therapists – something which he would have never allowed to happen had he been in good shape at the time.  The office was just as void of customers as it was the week before, although this time, Craig didn’t have to wait almost an entire half hour after his appointment was due to begin.

Doctor Boswjik greeted him, and with a brisk “Hi,” he stalked past her into her office and dumped his tired body into the corner of the closest sofa.

“Would you like a tea or coffee?” She asked him, closing the door and sparing a glance at her watch. “I always find I could use a hot drink in the mid afternoon.”

“No.” The shorter he kept his answers, the less she would have to write about him in her stupid notebook. “I’m fine.”

Craig didn’t drink tea or coffee anyway. He had always hated coffee most of all, and since his mid teens he found himself hating it even more.

“All right.”

The doctor made herself comfortable on her own, opposing sofa. And unlike Craig (who had worn sweatpants and the t-shirt he slept in to school that day) she looked pristine and dignified in her navy blazer and pencil skirt. She wore her hair in a smooth knot at the back of her neck. Craig watched critically as she extracted both a notebook and her glasses case from the drawer next to the sofa with tidily manicured hands. He ground his teeth together as she put her glasses on, and located her notes from last week in her book.

“Did you do the worksheets?” She looked up over her glasses at him as she asked. Craig shook his head and turned his face away, looking to the empty square of sky outside her office window. The clouds moving overhead were a dark, steely grey. The week had been muggy and overcast, but the poor weather was forecasted to leave by tomorrow morning. Craig wondered if it would take his insomnia with it.

“Really?” she wrote something down in her notebook. “How come?”

Craig had taken the worksheets out on Saturday evening, when he was unpacking his schoolbag and throwing out crumpled notes and apple cores in preparation for the coming week. The worksheets had been as tatty and grubby as the rest of the paper in his bag, and their contents almost precisely as useless. He had made a half-hearted attempt to try to complete one of them, before he found himself getting embarrassed and self-conscious. When he lost his temper and threw all of them into the garbage, he had forgotten why he decided to give one of them a go in the first place.

He struggled to remember why again now.

“I dunno. It seemed fucking dumb.”

Sitting at his desk with a pen, trying to keep whatever the fuck she thought a ‘Thought Record’ was, had been the single most ridiculous experience Craig had ever had in his life. The doctor wrote this down as well, although much to Craig’s discomfort she didn’t ask him to elaborate. Instead, once she was done, she set down her pen and looked at him as though she was contemplating a frozen dinner she might possibly find herself wanting to microwave.

It was unsettling.

“Do you have any plans for this weekend, Craig?”

This question seemed to come out of left field. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary question, the kind of thing he might have answered without a thought if it had been asked by a friend. But asked by a friend it wasn’t – instead it was being posed by this haughty creature, in a room where Craig was little more than a subject there for dissection and re-training. He hesitated, confused as to whether or not he should answer truthfully, or if he should lie. He did intend on going to Clyde’s house on Friday – There would be free alcohol and lots of pretty girls there. Maybe he would be lucky enough to meet a nice date? For all his hopes and lies though, Craig doubted it. More than likely he would just end up hammered, sleeping of Clyde’s sofa and waking in the morning only feeling a little more than usual like he wanted to die.

Craig hated drinking. He kind of thought the whole act was disgusting. But faced with an empty weekend and free liquor, he wasn’t able to bring himself to decline.

“Nope.” He answered eventually, although his pause made it obvious he was a dirty liar.

“Really? No plans with your friends? A girlfriend maybe? A boyfriend?”

“I’m single.”

He tried to make it as deadpan as possible, and he didn’t miss that she was careful to include the possibility of a boyfriend in there as well. Had her and his parents had talked about him at some stage behind his back? The ins and outs of his romantic relationships were little (if any) business of hers, and hopefully, such a brisk answer would end the conversation and she would never, ever, _ever_ bring it up again.

This too she appeared to make a note of in her pad. For the first time in almost an entire week, Craig felt a stab of emotion other than passive irritation at the fact that he was currently alive. He felt rage. He very much wanted to stand up, stalk right over there and snatch her notebook, so he could firmly box her a good one around the ears with it

“Why are you always writing everything down?!” he snapped. “It’s fucking weird!”

This seemed to take the doctor by surprise.

“These? These are just things I would be interested in exploring later with you. Details about your habits and patterns in your behaviours. You are welcome to read any of them any time.”  
She leaned across the coffee table between them, holding the notebook out in an offer for Craig to take it. Craig, not being an idiot, did exactly that. He snatched the notebook away and sunk back down into the sofa with it, eyes zipping to the top of the page where her pen strokes had left letters between the lines.

The notepad said only one thing. And why it said _that_ , of all things, Craig couldn’t even begin to imagine.

_Client is wearing the same T-Shirt he wore the week before._

He honestly hadn’t even noticed.

Craig glanced down at his shirt, at the mark on the bottom where he had dropped spaghetti on it Sunday night, and at the hem which was unravelling just a little from over wear. He wondered if his shirt was starting to stink a little, and he just couldn’t tell because he was accustomed to it. Had he worn another shirt at any stage during the entire week? He couldn’t for the life of him remember, and suddenly ashamed and disgusted with himself he tossed the notepad down onto the polished coffee table surface. Tiredness stole over him in a thick, aching wave. He wanted to crawl into bed and rest. He wanted to close his eyes, and be buried under sleep forever, ignorant of the fabric waste with which he had clothed his flesh and his bones.

“Craig, do you usually wear the same clothes every day?”

Craig had never noticed before, that he didn’t pay attention to the clothes he wore. He felt as though he was seeing something completely and impossibly new for the very first time.

He didn’t really think he liked it.

 

…

 

They stood around drinking scrumpy in the kitchen, the fluorescent light bulbs buzzing and making Craig’s head ache in anticipation of the hangover he would have in the morning. He was drunk, but he didn’t feel drunk in the way he thought people were meant to – the alcohol hadn’t lifted his spirits, or filled him with a fiery enthusiasm to party. Rather it had left him feeling groggy and trapped in a sluggish body, the faces and voices of his friends becoming confused, brightly coloured silhouettes overlapping and bleeding in to one another. The discussion was menial – the cheerful party chatter between friends. Clyde and Token had imbibed nowhere _near_ as much as Craig had. It was only eight pm and they still had plenty of night in which to get shitfaced ahead of them, if they were stupid enough to even get shitfaced at all.

“Do you _seriously_ think you will get in?”

Bebe struggled to believe Token had been invited to apply at some university – it must have been a good one because  Craig thought she sounded awfully impressed. Token acted sheepish enough, but he knew as well as everyone else standing around Clyde’s breakfast bar that he would get in wherever the hell he wanted. So would Bebe for that matter. Maybe not Clyde. But Craig didn’t doubt that he would get into a smaller college comfortably at least. Did Clyde even _want_ to go on to college or university? Craig felt vaguely like that was something he should know about his best friend.

His intoxication made it easy for him to become distracted, thinking about potential tertiary education paths and realising that he hadn’t even thought once about his own. This sudden thought gave him serious nausea. He swayed a little where he was standing, gripping the side of the kitchen table with sweaty palms, and tried not to loose focus on the pattern on the linoleum on the kitchen floor. One blue square, one grey one. One blue square, one grey one. As long as he could differentiate between the two, he would be fine.

“… Dude.” A voice roused him from his focus. It was familiar, but not overly so. Stan Marsh. He was no great companion of Craig’s, but a fairly dependable and adequate friend to Clyde, if only because they were both on the football team. “Are you okay?”

“’M fine.” Craig mumbled, groping for his nearly empty cider and almost loosing his balance again. “Gunna go sit. Maybe.” He picked up a drink, he wasn’t sure if it was his or not, and shuffled with a surprising amount of trouble into the lounge. This move didn’t help nearly as much as he hoped it would. The lounge was hot, and a lot dimmer than the kitchen – a significantly greater number of people were standing or talking or making out with one another against the walls in here, and the music was too loud. Or maybe it was the sound of forty classmates all chattering together at once. Craig tried his best to direct himself towards the sofa, but somehow his feet took him swerving left and he collided with a girl he didn’t recognise. Someone younger than he was, and made up like she was a lot older. She gave him a filthy look and he tried to apologise, but instead what came out of his mouth was

“You remind me of my sister.”

Which she did. Although when she rolled her eyes and stalked away like he had just said something considerably worse, he thought that obviously she didn’t care to hear it.

Disorientated, Craig used the lounge room wall for support, and slid down the back past the fireplace and toward the locked and curtained patio door. He wasn’t sure how, through the haze of inebriation, he remembered such a door even existed - what mattered was the fact that it was there and he was heading for it. Moving outside from the smell of beer and perfume, and the heat of other people all crammed together in a sweaty room, seemed imperative.

He made it to the door with no incident, and not realising that somewhere along the way he had lost his cider bottle (had he dropped it by the fireplace, maybe?) he fumbled with the latch on the handle of the sliding door.

The closed curtain gave a little flutter when he finally released the lock and inched the door open, and exhaling a deep sigh of relief Craig slid behind the heavy drapery and outside into the cold, snowy night. The noise inside was muffled by the glass and walls of the house, and the heat and sweat melted away the moment he felt cool air kissing his skin. Within seconds, he was shivering, folding his arms around himself and wandering a little further out over the frosty timber decking.

The night was clear and frozen – the overcast grey cloud from earlier that week had, as promised, passed by. The moon was a waxing smile high above his head. Clyde’s back yard, while small, boasted a prolific cluster of shrubs and trees around the borders, and in their foliage snow heaped in silent, sleeping pillows of ice. Craig sucked in a deep, cold breath, and savoured the cool ache of the night on his teeth and tongue. 

A cigarette.

Craig realised he wanted a cigarette. To burn the sharp taste of liquor from his mouth. He coughed, bringing on a small wave of dizziness, and the snowy wonderland around him swum like he was seeing it through a veil of water as he patted down his jeans for his cigarettes. He found no packet, but was successful in locating a slightly buckled camel in the bottom of his jacket pocket. His lighter he found no problem, tucked into the side of his boot, and as soon as he lit up and started smoking he found himself able to think a little clearer. Or maybe it was just the coldness eating through the heat of being drunk. He fingers were numb, and he tip of his nose as well. He looked skyward, and sought familiar constellations. This was not easy – even the stars seemed to be rearranging right before him, winking in and out in front of his eyes. He managed to locate Orion’s Belt. Or maybe it was the Big Dipper. He tried to trace the shapes they made with his finger, but ended up almost stumbling backwards over Clyde’s dad’s barbecue, stored and covered tidily against the side of the house.

Fuck. He wanted to go home. Fuck. He felt sick as hell and his head was spinning. Noise from inside came and went like waves ebbing through his mind. He sniffed and tried again to pull himself together. He was so drunk. So fucking drunk. Why was it that inside his belly he was still _hurting_?

His train of thought was broken by a girl laughing. A girl he had ever heard before, and saw only as a shadow and a sparkle of silver out of the corner of his eye. He twisted around to look at her, this light, giggly figure squeezing through the cracked open patio door, and suddenly Craig was seized with anger at the fact that she was interrupting him in his solitude. Why the fuck hadn’t he thought to close the door?

The shadowy girl he didn’t know pulled another body through the gap, this one larger and male and just as graceful. Craig watched, leaning against the barbecue, as the male form swept the girl up and made her squeal – a sound which raised the hair on Craig’s arms on end. The ache in his guts throbbed like it was cramping, clutching in on itself and trying to swallow his insides, and his edges, and implode.

“ _Not so loud!_ ” the boy picked her up with ease, hands gliding like flowing water over her thighs as she wrapped them tight around his waist. “Someone might come out and see us.”

“… Bit late for that.”

Craig was dully aware that he was slurring, and with a loud yelp of alarm the boy dropped her, and the two figures leapt apart as though they had been caught by someone significantly more menacing that Craig.

“Who are you!” The girl sounded furious, “Fucking _pervert_!”

Craig didn’t really care about that though. Honestly, he hardly even noticed.

“ _Tweek_?!”

Now they stood separated, the light leaking around the edges of the lounge room curtains revealed the couples faces, the darkness and the light creating strange and complicated shadow plays on their cheeks and jaws. Even in his utterly inebriated state, he recognised the way the Tweek’s face looked half illuminated, and the expression of shock and embarrassment that was beginning to take a hold of him.

Tweek stared.

Craig could feel him staring. For a moment, he almost thought Tweek didn’t recognise _him._ His eyes were impossible to make out, yet perfectly fixed, and his gaze served as an axis for Craig’s wobbling world to spin on. The longer the staring went on, the greater Craig felt the prickly and irrational heat of tears encroaching at the back of his nose. What the fuck Tweek? What the fuck? _Seriously_?!

Craig was thankful, briefly, for the darkness that concealed the little bumps rising over his skin. He was thankful that Tweek couldn’t see the flush burning in his cheeks from the feelings that were bubbling inside. He couldn’t even ask what he was doing here with her, because his tongue felt dead and useless in his mouth, and he had no words. He had no thoughts. Just an onslaught of memories about the smell of Tweek’s hair and the warmth in his hands, which made a tickle blossom in the cradle of Craig’s throat. It was like a mirror of old and long extinct excitement, his lips hot with the shadow of a forgotten kiss, and the sensations all fell upon him and then were gone again, dissolving like a scent fluttering past on a cold breeze. Craig was sure there must be a word he didn’t know, in some distant and beautiful language, to describe the sensation in all its uniqueness. He had never known craving for a word in his life until right now.

Eventually, Tweek recovered, and gave Craig a sheepish grin. He gestured to his female companion it was okay. Craig wasn’t a creep or anything. Just a regular guy. An old friend.

“Oh geeze, sorry Craig. I didn’t realise someone was out here.” He hooked a lock of hair behind his ear and the girl huffed, turning on her heel and stalking back to the house. Craig tried to shrug it off, expecting him to leave and take with him the churning, squirming chaos of unease in Craig’s skin when he did. But rather than depart and leave Craig alone to catch his racing heart, he lingered, just in the corner of Craig’s vision.

Craig hoped he would leave soon. Please let him leave. Each second he remained was torture because each second he remained reminded Craig that he was still out there. Living. Being happy separate from Craig, without him. He sucked on his cigarette and stared so hard at the sliver of moon overhead that it doubled, dancing in its own halo in the void sky. His hands were shaking like he was about to faint, and maybe (just maybe) he was.

“… Craig?”

“Mm.” Craig didn’t trust himself to speak.

“Are you okay?”

He heard Tweek step a little closer, and instantly he stepped a foot back.

“I’m fine.” He lied, his voice plasticy and unfamiliar and high. Right then, he wanted nothing more to lie down on the frozen earth and let his soul depart him. “Did you want a cigarette?”

It came out before he remembered he didn’t have any more. Tweek gave him a polite, pitying grin, and slow heavy thoughts began to occur to Craig one after the other.

Was that girl from high school? Had Tweek done things like that with her before? Had there been other girls alone with him, ones that Craig didn’t know about, and why was it that the notion of him fucking _anyone_ was making Craig feel like he was breaking in two?

“You know I don’t smoke.” Tweek told him.

“It’s never too early to start.”

Craig remembered, dropping his cigarette onto the patio and crunching it out in the wood, that he hadn’t brought any cigarettes with him for a reason.

Craig had spent that last two years doing his best to quit.

 

…

 

_The thing Craig liked most about her was that she didn’t ask him any compromising questions._

_It would have been too much to hope she didn’t know about him – almost everyone in the entire town did – but Collette was a nice girl a year older than he was, and Token had set the pair of them up with high recommendations both ways. As the pair of them sat in the back of a movie and groped each other, Craig began quite quickly to understand why._

_Collette didn’t speak much, and she seemed non-judgemental. She was uninterested in him and his opinions on matters, and in school she didn’t ask him why he never looked at Tweek in the halls. Every other girl he had tried to date before then… the first question had always been about Craig’s ex-boyfriend. For so long, it felt as though Craig was_ defined _by him, by their relationship and history together. But Craig didn’t want anything to do with him at all anymore, because. It would be so much easier for both of them to get on with their lives that way. Craig was starting to get an inch in his palms and between his legs lately that said he_ should _get on with it. And maybe if he carried on and tried harder, he might someday get where he wanted to be in his life._

_They had only known each other a week, but Craig had already decided that he wanted more than a few sly hook-ups in a movie theatre. He was starting to feel as though he had a point to make, and the sooner he got to fuck a woman the sooner he could shake off the remnants f his identity as Craig Tucker, resident teenaged homosexual._

_The thought of people perceiving him like that made him feel restless and ashamed. If he spent too much time lingering over it, he could sometimes even make himself sick._

_They went to her bedroom on a Friday after class. It was strange being in a girls bedroom because in sixteen years of life, he had never actually been in one before. His sister’s bedroom was off limits, and he insisted to anyone who listened that his cousin’s bedroom (Where he had to stay for a weekend when his parents were out of town) didn’t count. Collette’s room was not as tidy as he would have expected, and nor was it as pink and flowery, but Craig wasn’t concerned about he décor._

_Craig was concerned about the fuck._

_As far as first times go, Craig thought, as he lay in bed afterwards twirling his fingers in her hair, it could have been worse. The whole exchange had been simple, and straight forward, and although the actual intercourse had only lasted a few minutes he thought he had done alright. It wasn’t like he’d been expecting some life changing experience. This was only his first time!_

_Craig was too busy being slightly embarrassed at himself anyway, and a little bit disorientated by the place - The room he was in didn’t smell very comforting, and their conversation felt forced and awkward in the aftermath. It was rather like the two of them both felt that something wasn’t exactly right._

_He was relieved it was over. And also a little bit tired. He had to forcibly remind himself as he dozed and the sky turned from blue to sunset red that now he had gotten that out of the way, he could try again with another girl some other time. He liked to think he would do better, next time around._

_At least now he knew for sure he wasn’t gay._

_Despite all of this, Craig really didn’t feel any satisfaction. Why was it that the awkward, non-fitting pieces of the puzzle of his life still hadn’t fallen into place?_

_Collette sighed, and shuffled a little closer. Her hair tickled as it nudged against his face. Craig’s mind was wandering towards shadowy and unwelcoming areas of his head when he heard her, a voice that sounded different now he had also heard it breathless against the shell of his ear._

_“Hey Craig?”_

_“What?”_

_“I love you.”_

_Craig didn’t know what to say. But he did know he wanted to get out of there. Straight away._

_Maybe, he hoped as he picked up his stuff and stumbled his apologies for his mistake, he would do better next time around._

 

…

 

The numbers and functions swum around his page like fishes in a pond, darting and glimmering and impossible to pin down thanks to his exhaustion and dry eyes. The prickling itch of tiredness was killing him. There was nothing he wanted more than to crawl under his sheets and block out the world. But he knew that even if he tried rest would elude him – he was far too busy trying to think about his future. To accept that soon people would start asking him what college he was considering, and that soon entrance exams would be approaching, and that eventually his parents would start sliding envelopes and applications for polytechnics underneath his door.

It wasn’t that he didn’t _want_ to make a decision about it. It wasn’t like he _wanted_ to procrastinate on making up his mind. It was more like every time he even tried to think about it, his brain blanked, and like running up against a brick wall Craig was stuck, sitting with forms in his hands and no way to comprehend how to fill them out. Why he should do them. What was he doing again?  
Homework.

He tried to clear his head out a bit, reading and re-reading the topic statement as slowly as possible. It wasn’t sinking in, and the irrational fear that he had somehow forgotten how to read made him shudder. His pen dropped from his hand and rolled noisily across the surface of his desk. He had to pull himself together. Count his breaths. Clear his head. What was he thinking about? Hadn’t the doctor told him the other day, that he needed to be mindful of his thought patterns? What was he thinking about right now? He couldn’t remember.

He stood up and walked to his window, shoving it open and letting a sigh of frozen air inside. The cold cut a tiny space where he could think in his head, and inhaling deeply he rubbed his temples, trying to snatch more air into his lungs to oxygenate and freeze the maelstrom of thoughts in his brain.

 _Count your breaths_ , he told himself, echoing a voice from long ago. _Focus on nothing but your breathing. The feeling of air ballooning your lungs._

Craig came to realise his breathing was slowing after a period of what felt like a hundred years, although more than likely it was only a few minutes. Calming down came with a slow and dreamy amazement, a shear shock that he was sill here and unscathed, and a light-headedness which made him feel as though he was standing in a body which was not his own. Like if he took a step to his left he would be able to slide right outside and bare his naked spirit to the night-time air. The feeling of silent chaos was receding, back to the recess behind his lungs, and he swallowed a lump in his throat as he contained it there, inside a tight bone cage against his spine.  

His room.

He remembered he was standing in his room. His legs felt rigid and his hands were cold, the frosty air making the hairs on his arms stand on end. He turned his back to the window and gazed around his room, eyes lighting on the empty Guinea pig cage on his bookshelf, the dirty laundry basket behind the door, and his cell phone – a glowing beacon of full-battery-light on its charger by his bedside table. Numb and still thinking sort of slowly, Craig shuffled across the room to pick it up, and the green battery symbol in the top right corner filled him with a sense of something like relief. Although he probably couldn’t have explained why.

He yanked it off the charger, and opened his contacts, dropping down on to the edge of his breath and starting to scroll through the names on the list.

Someone to talk to. He really, _really_ needed to hear someone’s voice right now.

He didn’t want to call his Dad or Mom, because he had a nasty feeling they might yell at him for not having yet finished his homework, and he suspected with an uneasy wiggle in his chest that Clyde or Token or Jimmy wouldn’t understand. He couldn’t call a girl, in case they thought he was coming on to them, and no way was he calling Stan or Kyle or Kenny – he didn’t know any of them that well at all. He paused for a moment on Butters, but then remembered that Butters was only pleasant when not under the influence of Eric Cartman, and so it was he came to the end of his contacts and realised he had no one. Not a single person in the world who would lend him a hand.

Craig’s heart sunk a little, and he went with shaking fingers to turn his screen off, but then he saw a contact out of the corner of his eye he hadn’t seen for a while. Something he must have forgotten, because honestly Craig wasn’t the kind to go through his contacts much over time. Tweek’s number still had the same photo on it – back when he was ugly and squeaky and un-preened. The photo Craig had taken of them both when they were twelve.

Why the fuck did Craig still have that again?

He sniffed, a little unsettled, and feeling a little more like himself he went to delete it, but as he clicked on the other boys icon, and his thumb hovered over the trash button, he felt something stirring at the back of his mind. A memory not to fleeting  and insubstantial as memories past. A memory which was vivid, and warm, and bitter sweet.

When they were younger, when the only word Craig knew for his heart was ‘sad’, this slight boy half his size would clutch him, and rock him in time to the songs on the radio when he was down. The sadness had been so menial then, so shallow and unimportant and fleeting, and Craig wondered in a way he had never wondered before if low mood and coldness as a child had been a flag for how things would turn out now. If so, what the fuck would he be like in ten years time?

Tweek had always had a knack for aiding him. For warming him when he felt frozen inside and making him care about things that normally, Craig would give a fuck about at all. Perhaps it was because Tweek was fragile himself – a delicate, warm personality who bruised and shied away at being hurt. Maybe Craig had needed a soft hand once in a while. A gentle hand and a soft voice saying sweet things. The things Craig had never heard said to him before.

_Having you around is a reminder that I deserve good things._

That always made Craig feel special. But now, instead, the memory made him cry.

He sat under his open window and allowed himself to grieve silently, tears laying slow salty tracks down his face, and soon enough he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The kind from which he often wished he would never wake again.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today I spent about two hours deleting a few of the more heinous of my early fanfictions off the internet.  
> The only thing greater than my shame at having written them is my anxiety about them ever being read by human eyes again.


	3. CHURCH

Sunday mornings had been occupied by church services since before Craig could remember.

It probably wouldn’t have bothered him so much if His family had actually been practicing Catholics.

Unfortunately, the faith of his parents (and now he was thinking on it, almost _everyone_ in the old-fashioned little town) was entirely dependant on how well it suited them to practice it, and so because services were a great opportunity for the family to dress cleanly, and show up other families who had similar ideas about the wholesome, clean fun of a sermon on chastity, they often made a habit of attending even though not a single person in the household actually had any genuine belief in god. The service, an exercise in making good impressions, was usually followed by a lunch of muffins in the chapel lounge, and although Craig honestly felt no great love for stale cakes and dry conversation he was desperately looking forward to it today. He had not eaten breakfast, and so as he sat in the hard wooden pew fiddling with the fraying ribbon bookmark on the prayer book in front of him he had to listen to his stomach growling and grumbling rather than the sermon at hand.

Not that he cared that much. The sermon was on joyfulness, and frankly even mention of the word made Craig sneery.

he tied a tight little knot in the prayer book ribbon, and prepared to make a row of others, when his mother gave him a sharp poke in the arm and a look that said _don’t mess around with that or we may have to replace it._ Craig’s mother has already had to replace a large and surprisingly expensive book of psalms this year - a few weeks ago his sister accidentally ripped a large wad of pages out of one and she had gotten in a lot of trouble for it.

he decided it was best if he didn’t engage in a repeat performance.

Instead, he set the book back on the ledge behind the pew in front of him, and turned his eyes upwards to the ceiling. At least, Craig thought, if he was going to spend his Sunday morning bored stupid he may as well be bored stupid somewhere where the light was bright and the view was pretty. Looking into the eaves of the church, Craig almost found himself thinking that the whole deal wasn’t actually that bad. High ceilings were quite calming to gaze into, and between wooden beams and stained glass windows the echoing drone of father maxi was as comforting as it was tedious. the wintery morning sunlight streamed in through the windows and made the air seem more transparent than usual, and at the front of the church patches of sunshine bled through leaded glass casing coloured speckles on the on the wooden walls and stone floor.

In its own way, it was really quite beautiful.

Craig sighed and closed his eyes, allowing weariness to steal over him while no one else in the church was looking. Every eye and mind in the building was trained on the preacher, even those who disregarded his teachings the second they departed the holy space, and for one rare moment in his life Craig felt a little less like he was in the spotlight. Even his friends, sitting with their own families a few rows down, became silent and contemplative during a service, and this in itself was a fair miracle. Clyde didn’t make any witty comments, and Token didn’t lean over the backs of the pews to leer at him and roll his eyes. It was almost as though, for a split-second, they really were taken in by promises of happiness and comfort in the lord. Or maybe it was just a matter of seventeen years practice which resigned them to a moment of respect.

When he opened his eyes again, the sermon seemed to have proceeded not at all, and the only indicator that any time had passed was the wax on the altar candles ripping in languid dollops down the candle shafts. Craig checked his watch, and saw there was still at least twenty minutes left. Father Maxi was quoting Romans, 15:11. Craig didn’t know what that was and he didn’t care. His stomach rumbled again – how long until he could finally have breakfast?

His eyes wandered along the opposite wall, and the rows of pews across the aisle that were full of bodies and faces he knew but couldn’t be bothered recalling in that moment. Before he realised what was happening, his eyes were drifting behind him and he craned his neck to see toward the back of the church and the people who frequented the services less often, or as they saw fit.

His heart leapt to his throat the moment he locked eyes with someone, and he knew who it was instinctively long before he could recall their name, of their face, or anything about them besides the fact that eye contact made his stomach turn over and his whole body heat like he was being exposed to a flame.

Tweek’s hair looked golden in the sunlight, bathed in fire and whiteness pouring through panels of leaded glass. It was as though he was a stranger, a lone angel dropping from the pictures in stained glass like a spark from the circle of empyrean and seated between two people Craig thought seemed dull and listless in his glow. In the moments Craig spent staring, Tweek’s eyes widened in surprise, and then suddenly he was just a normal boy again. Blond hair. Green eyes. Skin light and transparent white. The two of them stared for a moment longer, shocked to be caught looking at one another across such a vast space, and then Tweek seemed to get a hold of himself enough to be polite. He twitched his mouth into a sheepish, guarded smile - Craig drew back as if stung and forced himself to jerk his eyes away.

He spent the remainder of the service sitting rigidly in his seat, his gaze fixed on the candles at the altar until the brightness bleached blind spots and blotches inside his eyes.

 

...

 

_They had been having a perfectly amiable conversation just a few moments before._

_Craig had been talking about his fathers friends. About Sunday barbecues and cold beers on a summer afternoon. Tweek had sat on the edge of the bed listening attentively, his eyes too big and his hair a mess, and the way he clung to every word made craig a little bit cockier than he was usually. Louder, and braver, and a little more liberal with the truth. In those moments, Craig might have been able to recognise that he felt something for him. Something affectionate and grateful, like he might have felt towards an adoring pet. Tweek’s attention was incredibly and incomparably gratifying – he had never had anyone pay such great attention to him before._

_“Anyway,” he said, feeling quite impressive as he built up to what he was about to say.  “I took something from the coffee table when no-one was looking. I think I got away with it. I think.”_

_Tweek’s eyes, if possible, grew even wider._

_“You took something?” he asked, in a hushed, nervous little voice. Craig nodded, basking in the attention and lying on his back on the mattress on the floor._

_“Sure did.”_

_“What did you take?”_

_“Oh, you know.” He reached beneath himself and felt around in his back jeans pocket. The box it contained was small and squashed, mostly empty and definitely worse for wear. When he held it up for Tweek to see it, his heart leapt in triumph because this newness, this excitement and foray into the forbidden... well Craig thought that this was happiness. This was what living was all about._

_“Nothing much.”_

_Tweek’s took a moment to realise what he was holding. Craig waited in silent anticipation, his excitement almost overflowing as he watched the expression of realisation dawn on the face of his closest friend. Boyfriend. He was so glad they would get to share this moment. So happy that on Monday, the pair of them would have a secret that set them apart. This was by far the most important moment of their relationship. The moment that made them special, that gave them something to bond over, that gave them a secret they both could share until their graves._

_He was absolutely astonished when, rather than giving way to that expression of unique, fearful awe that he so often bestowed upon Craig’s actions and acquisitions, Tweek’s face took on a mask of disbelief and disgust, mingling with a terror that was unfamiliar to Craig even in all the years he had known him._

_“Craig?! What the fuck?! You can’t have that!”_

_He made to snatch the packet of cigarettes away. Hurt and shocked, Craig jerked them out of reach. Tweek almost unbalanced and fell out of bed._

_“What?” he asked, trying to figure out what Tweek’s problem was? “Why not?”_

_“Cigarettes are dangerous! They can kill you!”_

_It took Craig a moment to realise that Tweek had thought he meant that they should smoke them. Right now, in his room._

_What the fuck?_

_What kind of an idiot did he think he was?!_

_“Excuse me?” he asked, and he was at half mind to march downstairs, light one on the Tweek’s stovetop and smoke it right at this second right now. Did Tweek not understand the concept of a secret? Of shared knowledge of a thing that shouldn’t be done? Did he really thing Craig would be so stupid, as to smoke something as precious as this? This was supposed to be a thing they could keep between them. A secret to remember in moments they were separate, and to have for themselves and themselves alone._

_“You can’t smoke those!”_

_“I wasn’t going to!”_

_“So why do you have them?!”_

_“I- I...”_

_Craig trailed off, still reeling from the sudden response this had earned from him. His mood seemed to have taken a sharp downward turn - where before there had been excitement and anticipation, there was only tenderness. Hurt. Shame._

_He tightened the grip on the cigarettes and decided then that he was going to go straight home tomorrow morning and burn them. He had been stupid to even think that Tweek would care..._

_“No reason.” He mumbled, turning his face away. From this low angle on the ground, Craig could see the underside of Tweek’s work desk. The gap between the carpet and the bottom of his bedroom door. “Forget about it.”_

_And as Tweek stared at him in disgusted terror, his resolve hardened. He decided to never try and impress Tweek Tweak again._

_..._

The doctor sat in her spot on the sofa and looked at Craig expectantly, waiting for any questions or concerns he might have had.

“Exercise?” he repeated, still just inches short of comprehending. “I’m not really into physical activity or anything.”

“Not exercise, _exercise._ Exercises. I’m going to teach you some techniques which will make it easier for you to breathe and bring you back down when you start to feel a little overwhelmed.”

“... Okay?”

Although he was already familiar with plenty of these, Craig though it sounded like a welcome break from being cross examined. He did briefly wonder though, if it was just because Doctor Boswjik was starting to become frustrated and disheartened’ by his closed answers. Instead of feeling triumphant about this, Craig was surprised to observe that he actually felt a little bit hurt. What was it about this environment that rendered his triumphs of will hurtful? It certainly wasn’t the first time doctor Boswjik’s office had made him feel this way.

The doctor gave him an approving nod, and set down her notebook and pen.

“This is a technique I usually teach to clients who struggle with phobias, but I think it might be good for you to practice it a little every day. If you could close your eyes and listen carefully to my instructions? Everything we are about to do is going to take place inside your head.”

Craig frowned, giving her a lingering look in anticipation of further elaboration, but none was forthcoming.

He closed his eyes.

The first thing he noticed with his eyes closed tightly was that he didn’t like it. Doctor Boswjik did not say anything, and maybe it was that which lent such a feeling of uneasy awareness to the act. He became conscious of his body on the couch, and became conscious of her presence even though there was no tangible reason as to why he should feel this way. It was a weirdly vulnerable sensation - after about twenty seconds of silence Craig opened them again, only to see his therapist still sitting in the same position she was before, studying him with that same neutral expression she always wore.

“Am I just going to sit here with my eyes closed like a dick or something?”

“No, I was just waiting for you to become accustomed to the experience before I started talking. Close your eyes again, and concentrate on yourself sitting right there, in that sofa.”

Craig considered telling her to fuck herself, but didn’t have the energy to start an argument. He figured he might just play along and maybe when his forty minutes was up he would be able to go home, and the doctor would tell his parents that today she thought she had started to make some progress.

Nonetheless, he still found it extremely difficult to close his eyes, and recede back into that uncanny blind space inside his head. Once there, he was once again conscious of his weight on the couch, and of another separate entity in the same small room with him. He tried to concentrate instead on grasping some physical sense of his body. It was only once he began to direct focus to his limbs on purpose that he realised that he was sore and heavy with the restless night he had had the day before. And that his jeans were tight and quite restricting on his thighs.

“Are you concentrating?”

The doctors voice came as if from a great distance, not really jolting him from his mental examination of his feet in his shoes but kind of disrupting it a little bit.

“Uh huh.”

“Okay. I need you to listen now, carefully to my voice. I am going to talk you through a short relaxation exercise, and then we can concentrate on locating areas of significant concern to your wellbeing. If during the relaxation exercise you come across any parts of yourself which you are uncomfortable to consider, please make note of them and move on. Okay?”

“... Sure.”

Craig still hadn’t opened his eyes. His concertation was trained almost entirely on how uncomfortable it actually was, to wear shoes.

“You need to start by taking a deep breath. Pull the air right into your lungs, and hold it there inside your chest. Let your focus move to your face, and try and identify all the muscles there one by one.”

It was a weird instruction, Craig thought, turning his attention to his forehead. He took a deep breath, and focused on observing the feeling there. Whether or not it felt tense. Relaxed. Creased. Sore.

He found it felt more or less like a forehead ought to, although maybe there was a little pinch of tension in between his eyebrows. This was both a relief and very disappointing at the same time.

He tried to smooth out his unconscious frown, before turning his attention to all the other aspects of his face and relaxing them, one by one. There was a surprising amount of tightness in his jaw.

“As your shoulders lower,” she told him, and her voice now had taken on a strange and disconnected quality, like it was something he was hearing from all around him rather than a singular specific source. “Delve into your chest, and relax your back, and then keep going down until you are focusing inside your core. Once you’re there, you can focus on unlacing the knots of worry and fear thread by thread, and once you’ve done that you can release your breath again.”

He hadn’t noticed, but Craig had fallen into the habit of taking and holding deep breaths of air, in sync with each part of his body as he studied it. He drew a deep, dizzying breath into his lungs. Her voice was gentle and hypnotic. He was drifting in the dark and he was alone.

His thoughts slipped down his neck without resistance, seeking to plunder the depths of his torso. But he found that the moment he tried to focus on anything below the root of his throat, his breathing faltered. A sudden stitch appeared in his chest, the fragile calm that had settled in the room suddenly broken. He opened his eyes.

“I don’t like that.” He said, disorientated by the brightness of the daylight in the room and the vivid colours of the carpet and the books in shelves around the walls. His doctor cocked her head, and nodded in neutral sympathy.

“How come?”

He shrugged.

“I dunno. I just don’t.”

He couldn’t possibly explain more eloquently why. Thinking about his deepest insides was akin to pressing on a purpling bruise. The less attention he paid to the ever echoing chamber inside him the less it seemed to ache, and expressing vulnerability he hadn’t known before he crossed his left leg over the other one, hoping she wouldn’t ask him any more questions.

“Does it upset you?

Craig shrugged.

“Does it make you nervous? Sad?’

“I dunno.” Craig told her, feeling peevish now she was pushing it. He felt himself flushing, and cross his legs tighter. “I just don’t like it I guess. It feels like if I think about my insides, I might fall in.”

“Fall into what?”

Craig didn’t know. A black hole? A sucking vacuum of nothing, like the void at the edge of a towering cliff? It was impossible, the size of the untouchable parts inside himself. It was impossible to envision them, or examine them, and just thinking about doing so made him break into a cold sweat. Craig glared at her, taking in the flicker of hopefulness in her face, before she realised that her line of inquiry ad now been severed. Craig’s guard was back up again and he wasn’t letting it down any time soon.

Scowling, Craig turned his face away and began to look for points of interest on the walls. It doesn’t take him long to notice a new addition – something in the space that had either been previously non-existent, or that he had never noticed before.

“Is that poster new?” he asked, nodding to the photograph of the milky way framed and hanging above a low decorative cabinet. It was a view of the starry belt from far up north – Craig could tell from the landscape and perspectives that it was probably taken in one of the northernmost points in the world. The stars depicted there were too numerous for him to identify any of the constellations therein.

Doctor Boswjik raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“It is. Do you like it?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty cool I guess. Where did it come from?”

“The second hand bookshop down the road from here sells stunning poster photographs like this for $10. I never particularly cared for the one that was there before it.”

“Hmm.”

Craig had been coming here for two weeks and he couldn’t even remember what the poster before that one was. They lulled into silence, and Craig considered asking if she knew what it depicted. The latitude and longitude of the location it had been taken.

“... Do you like space?” she asked, starling him from his ponderings about such things. Craig nodded before he thought about it – a response as natural as swatting a fly.

“Yeah. I think about space a lot. I guess I find it kind of comforting? Its like...  it doesn’t matter how badly I feel like I fuck up here on earth, all those stars out there... all those planets. They really don’t give a shit about anything. Sometimes i wish i could be like that.”

Doctor Boswjik looked at him for a moment, processing what he was telling her, and then she nodded.

“Okay.”

And that seemed to be the end of the matter.

 

 

...

The lunch bell rang at 12.40, and students flooded out of their classrooms on a wave of excited chatter and recklessly flung backpacks. Craig shuffled out of calculus a the back of a small crowd, his head feeling bloated like it was full of wet paper towel. He felt sodden with new information. Unable to process so much as a word.

He followed the flow of the foot traffic down the hallways, heading towards his locker close by the canteen and hoping against experience that he wouldn’t arrive there second to Token or Clyde. Craig really wasn’t feeling up to having lunch with the pair of them today. He didn’t want to sit silently in a huge room full of loud voices, and feel like he was sitting a million miles away. He didn’t want to ask Token a hundred times to repeat himself, or watch Clyde and Bebe discretely caressing each other under the table, and frankly the notion of a canteen lunch was making him feel nauseous. Perhaps, if he was fortunate, he would be able to grab his bag lunch and head somewhere quiet to eat alone. The picnic tables behind the gym or something. He didn’t know.

No such luck.

When he made it to his locker, Clyde was already there, piling his gym kit in his own locker next door and listening to Jimmy enlighten him on the issues with the Shakespearian literature topic currently being taught in drama class. Craig didn’t know much about Shakespeare – all he knew was that Tweek Tweak didn’t like him. And he hated that he knew that, because if there was one thing he _hated_ it was not being able to forget those kinds of details. Little disjointed Fragments of someone else, isolated and unique to that period and place in time. Sometimes, he lay awake and think about it – about all the information he still had about this stranger he used to know well – and the way that certain days and subjects made all the hairs on his arms stand on end. The memories were like glass shards embedded in his skin, forever immortalised in the physical and chemical wiring of his mind.

He sighed, edging by Clyde and twisting in his combination, and his friends didn’t pause to acknowledge his presence until he was finished loading his textbooks and had extracted the transparent kliplock lunchbox he had brought sandwiches in.

Well, they were really more like slices of bread with jam on them. Given how shit Craig had felt when he got up this morning, he was impressed he had managed to pack anything. He grabbed a lukewarm can of cola as well, from the six-pack at the back of his locker and closed the door.

“You look fucked man.” Clyde was being particularly forward today. Craig rolled his eyes.

“Thanks. I feel fuckin awful.”

“Are you sick?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” He paused, turning to regard the emptying corridor behind him, and observing the way in which the few lingering bodies in the hall were heading in the direction of the lunchroom. His grip on his can of cola tightened. Distantly, he could hear the volume of chatter that swelled with the population of students in a singular, informal location. Something inside him waivered, and he realised that there was absolutely, positively no way he could tolerate sitting in that packed out space today. The people... the noise... it was giving him claustrophobia just thinking about it! And if anyone tried to look at him, they would pose a question exactly like Clyde’s.

_What’s wrong with you? Are you okay? You look like you haven’t slept for days._

Almost certainly because he hasn’t.

“You guys go on ahead.” He said decisively, turning back to the pair of them and, when jimmy made questioning eye contact, managing a terse little smile. “I’m just gunna stop by the bathroom quick.”

“Time for a shit?”

It never failed to surprise Craig, how bizarrely stupid Clyde could be.

“... that’s the implication,” he said, even though it hadn’t really been his intention at all. “I’ll re-join you in a bit.”

Clyde nodded, and Jimmy gave a quick “Sure’, and they both watched slightly discomfortingly as Craig wandered back down the hallway in the way he came – directly against the flow that every other student in school had taken a few minutes before.

He went to a bathroom close to the science lab, between a cleaners closet and a glass fronted trophy case. Inside, it didn’t smell too bad, and the silence was a blessing even though he found the frosted windows high up did not let in nearly enough light. He had a choice between all three cubicles, but ultimately he chose the furthest one, locking the door before closing the toilet lid and taking a seat semi-comfortably upon it.

There was graffiti on the walls. Some of it was funny, but most of it was very, very rude. As he opened his lunchbox and pulled out one of his sandwiches, Craig skim read the one on the left side title wall, about shoulder height. It said

_Phillip and Eileen fucked here._

Good for them. Craig thought of all the places he wouldn’t want to have sex in, this was probably right up there on the list.

He wasn’t that happy to be eating lunch here either, although he supposed it was better than the alternative.

 


	4. LUNAR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ive had this chapter written for so long and i keep procrastinating on putting it up. :/ I did my best to proof read late on a sunday night - i hope there arent too many blatant errors!

He took the playbill offered to him at the door, and dressed in navy blue chinos and the cleanest t-shirt he currently owned he followed Clyde dutifully into the auditorium.

“I can’t believe you talked me into this.” He grumbled, as they located their allocated seats and pulled them down for sitting in. Craig had always despised the high school auditorium chairs – they were the sort which had the seats that flipped up, and his legs were too long and too awkward to fit comfortably in them. Clyde just gave him a shit eating grin, and set about dragging the snacks and sugary contraband he had snuck into the theatre out of his sleeves and pockets.  

“You owed me,” he said, and if it was even possible Craig found himself regretting getting drunk at Clyde’s two weeks ago even more. He should have known Clyde would hold it over him, when he had allowed him to taxi Craig’s inebriated ass home.

“Yeah. But you know when people say ‘I owe you one’ very few of them actually _mean_ it,” He glared at Clyde, who shrugged and offered him a mini Reeses cup out of the packet he had smuggled down his blazer.

“Like I was going to let an opportunity like this pass me by. And besides, you haven’t left the house on a Friday night for _ages_. This is like... I dunno. A fun, wholesome bro activity.”

Craig didn’t think that going to the high school drama class end of semester production counted as a ‘fun, wholesome bro activity’. Especially considering he knew for a fact that the only reason Clyde was going was that Bebe would have dumped his ass if he didn’t. Clyde had only decided to drag Craig along because he hadn’t wanted to go alone.

But, with all that said, who could blame him? Clyde had really saved Craig’s ass the other week, so Craig figured, after being petitioned and threatened with tears, that he probably _did_ owe him this much.

It wasn’t like Craig had anything else planned to do tonight.

All the same, a sense of vague discomfort filled him as he sat in the slowly filling auditorium reading the playbill, which was printed on xerox paper in low quality black and white. _The Crucible_ , the title read. _By Arthur Miller_.

“Isn’t this the play we studied in freshman year?” he asked, ignoring Clyde’s offer of candies and trying to change the subject. Clyde shrugged, and peered over Craig’s shoulder to read the names and roles of everyone in the class. Bebe was playing Elizabeth Proctor, but the pair of them knew this fact already because she had been complaining about it almost all semester. Even _Craig_ knew she had wanted to play Abigail, but that part had been assigned to Nicole and Craig was of the opinion that this was probably appropriate. Nicole was a much better actress - It made sense that she would be given the role with the most lines.

“What’s Tweek billed as?” Clyde asked him, and Craig’s stomach flipped. He tried to sound casual as he reported he didn’t know, even though he knew exactly what character name would be next to Tweek’s when he turned the bill over to the other side.

_Yves F. Tweak as Rev. John Hale_

He had checked the back already, and seen his name, as though it had been written in florescent ink and decorated with gold relief foil.

The fucker.

Craig passed the playbill to Clyde as casually as he could, and let his eyes scan the crowd in an effort to distract himself. He felt a little like his skin was crawling, like he couldn’t sit still because there were insects in his best navy pants, and this feeling grew even stronger as he realised that most of the people in the audience, shuffling into their seats and chatting to one another across rows, were parents and family. No boyfriends or classmates like him and Clyde. He felt a bit stupid and kind of like everyone was staring at him, and even though he knew that on stage, with the bright light in his eyes and his head in the play, Tweek would never be able to see him, he still felt as though somehow he would be able to sense that Craig was here and Craig was watching him. And Craig didn’t like that feeling at all.

“What the fuck is this?’ he heard Clyde saying next to him. “Bebe told me Tweek was supposed to play John Proctor.”

Before Craig could respond to this the lights dropped, sinking them all into darkness, and relieved to be hidden in shadows close to the back of the auditorium Craig shushed him. The cavernous room fell silent, and Craig thought he could hear the pounding of his heart in his chest echo off the ceiling as the stage lights clicked on, and illuminated the heavily draped red curtain obscuring the stage.

He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be here.

He wished he wished he wished he could just go home.

As it turned out, _the Crucible_ was slightly more enjoyable to watch than it was to read. Craig didn’t enjoy the play on any level, however - just as he was starting to relax, and think that he was starting to understand the plot and the angle the playwright was coming from, Craig saw a familiarly tall, familiarly blonde boy in puritan garb emerging stage left, and every single semblance of comprehension he had thought he had held before came to pieces.

Tweek was a proficient actor. He had started to come across better once he learned how to project an air of confidence, and although it had taken three or four years Craig supposed he must have gotten the hang of it, once they broke up. It was hard to concentrate on the plot, hearing him speak to a silent auditorium, but at the same time it was impossible to focus on _him_ because there was something so alien about seeing him pretend to be something he was not. Perhaps, on some level, Craig felt slighted, that Tweek could have possibly grown as a person without him. Perhaps there was something threatening, about considering the possibility that beneath the facade of a preacher versed in the works of the devil Tweek wasn’t the exact same person he was when he was fourteen. Perhaps Craig was just annoyed that Clyde had convinced him to do this, and now he couldn’t sit still and he couldn’t look away from that face which had taken on an unfamiliar pallid tone under bright lights and stage makeup, and everyone else on the stage looked unfamiliar but not in the same kind of way Tweek did. Tweek’s unfamiliarity looked terrifying. Upsetting and distasteful. Craig wanted to crawl across rows of seats and leap onstage and shake him, and to tell him he looked like a pointed joke with all that face paint slathered on his cheeks. Clyde offered him a tube of pringles – Craig took them and ate without thinking of it, and he watched the play right through to the end without being able to absorb anything but the times Tweek was on stage, and the times Tweek was not. He didn’t even notice when Bebe had lines.

The end came much too fast, and much too soon simultaneously. When the curtain closed, and applause started to fill the auditorium, Craig made to stand up, go home, and lie in bed for the rest of the week recovering. He planned to tell Clyde he was never going to ask another favour from _him_ any time soon as well. His friend grabbed his wrist before he could do so, though, and Craig’s heart sunk to his ankles when the curtains raised and the entire cast was on stage, taking a bow.

It didn’t take him a second to locate Tweek in the bow, grinning and holding hands with the actors either side of him. The audience applause swelled, but Craig’s insides seem to shrivel and turn to dust when he saw that the woman standing next to Tweek, on the left side of him, was the same girl from the party a few weeks ago.

What the fuck.

What the fuck.

Why was he holding her hand?

The curtains dropped again, and Clyde released his wrist and started to collect his scattered recyclables and candy wrappers. Craig remained where he was, frozen in his seat, and didn’t move even when Clyde stood up and gazed around them, to the people all gathering their possessions and chattering amiably as the lights in the auditorium brightened.

“... You alright Craig?” he asked, frowning as he cocked his head in that particular, puppyish way that Clyde did. “You look very pale.”

“That girl.” He said to him, ignoring his question. “Who played Rebecca Nurse. Is Tweek dating her or something?”

Clyde frowned even harder, reaching down into Craig’s lap and picking up the pringles can lying there forgotten.

“What? Dude, what kind of a question is that? How the fuck am I supposed to know.” He scoffed, and gave Craig a friendly punch on his upper arm. “Now hurry up and move your ass. I need to pee like nobody’s business, and the two of us are meeting Bebe round back to pick her up.”

He paused for a moment, looking thoughtful, and then added.

“If you’re really _that_ interested, ask Bebe. The two of them spend every fucking day together lately. He probably knows sees more of her than I do.”

Craig didn’t think he would be doing that.

 

...

 

_It was raining, but inside it was warm. The two of them sat on the floor of Craig’s darkened bedroom with pillows and duvet, looking at the constellation of glow in the dark stars Craig had stuck to his ceiling. They each had a hot drink in hand. Coffee and green tea respectively. Tweek had a few vanilla biscotti on the side._

_“Which is your favourite?” he asked, dipping his biscotti into his coffee just long enough to make it soft and easy to bite. “Constellation I mean. I can’t really tell them apart.”_

_Craig furrowed his brow, thinking hard about how to answer that question. His eyes wandered to the replica of Draco, then on to Cassiopeia, and to Pisces. He thought briefly that he liked them all well enough – they were all stars and they were all beautiful. The shapes they made were unconscious and inconsequential, and he probably could have admired them in equal measure if they were regimented in a completely regular pattern across the sky._

_“Tough question.” He pressed his hands tighter around the sides of his mug. Tweek hummed and offered him his last biscotti._

_“I have a harder one?” he said. Craig rolled his eyes._

_“Try me.”_

_“... Who would win in a fight between a vampire and a black hole?”_

_No kidding._

_Craig tried to maintain a straight face, but that wasn’t easy when he could feel Tweek looking at him, not quite earnest like he was as a child, and not quite wry as he would become as a teenager, but in a tone which was a peculiar in-between. As though he was waiting for Craig to start laughing before he allowed a victorious or knowing smile to curl his lips. Despite himself, Craig started laughing. He still wasn’t accustomed to the feeling of smiling with braces on his teeth, and he still wasn’t entirely accustomed to Tweek’s sense of humour so at times it was hard to tell, if he was being genuine or if he was just more sardonic than his shy veneer would have one believe. Embarrassed, and unsure if he was supposed to laugh, Craig lifted a hand to cover his mouth and obscure his laughter. As he did he saw Tweek’s face break into a smile, and he was relieved._

_At least, he was until Tweek was reaching for him, his fingers hovering a few inches back from his wrist before resolving to touch and push his guarding hand out of the way._

_“Don’t hide your smile,” He said, his voice soft and hesitant and making shivers pass down Craig’s spine. “You have such a nice smile.”_

_“I do not.”_

_He pulled his wrist out of Tweek’s grasp and tensed his jaw. Tweek sighed._

_“You do too. I like your dimples.”_

_He pointed to his own cheeks, pressing his fingertips against them so small dimples appeared under his fingertips. Craig thought that the shadows of the late night made the likeness poor._

_“I don’t have dimples.”_

_“You do! If you weren’t so scared to smile more I think you’d know that already.” He dropped his hands, and leaned closer. Craig’s first response was to move backwards, but he resisted the instinct purely on account of the fact that he knew Tweek well, and he trusted him, even if it was strange to see his face in shadows at close range._

_“What are you doing?”_

_“I can’t see you in the dark so good.”_

_Craig wasn’t in the same position. He could make out Tweek’s eyes, and his lips, and the thought for an unnerving moment that he could see something flicker over his features like he was contemplating moving closer, but then decided not to. It made the hairs on the nape of his neck stand on end._

_“You need glasses.”_

_“I don’t have them on me.”_

_“That was stupid.”_

_He brought his hand up, placing it between Tweek’s face and his own and pushing him gently away. The other boys breath was warm on his palm, and he seemed a little shocked, even offended, to be manhandled in this fashion._

_“Hey! Dude!”_

_“You don’t need to be that close to me. It’s gay as hell.”_

_“... What?”_

_Craig shrugged, and brought his mug up to clutch to his chest._

_“Gay. You get to close sometimes. It weirds me out.”_

_“Oh.” Tweek sits back, his stance erect to the point of being unnatural. “Ohkay then?”_

_Craig sighed, and turns his eyes up to the ceiling again. For some reason, he felt a little bit guilty, and when he brought his mug to his lips he thought for a moment the ceramic felt cold. Like it didn’t belong there. Like maybe in a parallel universe he was kissing soft petal skin instead of a lukewarm hot chocolate and baked clay._

_He tried to think about vampires, and black holes, and they didn’t talk about it._

_..._

 

“So what’s your favourite thing about space then?”

The question felt forced, but Craig decided it was probably nice of her to ask it. He wasn’t sure, but there were times when he thought he was warming towards his therapist. Or maybe he was just getting used to her. Either way, he decided to humour her, even though he had decided years ago that questions about his favourite space entities were a waste of his time and obviously, only someone with no real commitment to astronomy would ask it.

“I dunno. Black holes are pretty cool.”

“Do you think? I think most people find the concept of something from which even light can’t escape quite scary.”

Craig shrugged.

“It’s okay. I had a conversation once, about whether or not a vampire could escape one. Seeing as they live forever and all that.”

Doctor Boswjik’s eyebrows arched, and she uncrossed and recrossed her legs patiently, in faux interest.

“And could it?”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

They fell silent, and Craig’s eyes wandered to the poster on the wall. As he looked at the colours and the snow, he remembered something which brought with it a wave of nostalgia and hopelessness which sapped the last fragments of cheerfulness he thought he might have felt when he woke that morning.

“When I was a kid, I had this idea about how cool it would be, to be the first human being to live on Mars.”

He paused a little, to allow her to sit up and take interest. Much to his private satisfaction, she did. Her eyes brightened obviously, and her pen twitched upright against her notebook. Perhaps, rather than coming to warm to her, or becoming accustomed to her, he was starting to learn how to act around her. This brought with it a sense of relief, and a sense of sadness as well. Because knowing how to act around someone in order to please them, or what to say to keep them off his back, was a strangely isolating thing to learn to do. It kept him safe. Far away from anyone who might have been able to get to know him _really?_ It relieved him of the responsibility of telling someone how he truly felt.

“Oh? How come?”

“Well, I read this article online. About this thing called ‘Mars to stay’. It involves sending astronauts and hopeful scientists to Mars, thereby immortalising them in history forever.”

“Hmm... Lofty ambition for a young boy from Colorado?”

“Yeah I guess. But there’s a catch.”

He hesitated, wondering if she would ask him, or if she would just leave silence in invitation for him to carry on. She chose the latter, and he continued.

“The catch is, you get sent there, and you change the trajectory of human civilisation forever and ever, but there aren’t enough resources on earth to equip you with enough stuff to make a round trip. You have to stay there, alone on Mars for the rest of your life. And then, you die.”

“You die?”

“Yeah. Alone.”

The doctor seemed thoughtful, studying him silently for a few seconds, before looking down at her pad and scrawling a few short words with hr pen.

“And this was what appealed to you then?”

“Uh huh. I used to think that would be incredible. To be that important, and that free from responsibilities and accountable to no one but yourself for the rest of eternity.”

“Well, wouldn’t you miss your family?”

“… Yeah?”

It was a lukewarm agreement, at best. Craig thought that to miss people, he would probably need to have some kind of close emotional attachment to them first. Maybe there was something wrong with him, maybe puberty had turned him into a cold, unfeeling monster, but Craig couldn’t recall having had strong feelings for his family in a long time. Unless aversion and frustration counted? He didn’t think they did.

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“Well, you know. I don’t have the best relationships with my family these days. Fuck, sometimes I don’t even really like my friends. I know people say that when you feel like I do, you gotta make your life meaningful through connecting with others, but every time I even consider the idea I get put off because I keep going back to asking myself what’s the point. We’re all gunna die anyway, and the more people I know and the more ‘meaning’ I construct the more upsetting it’s going to be when I realise that none of that is really _real_ outside my own head. I may as well die two hundred and twenty five million kilometres away from everyone else, and do something that means that the things I do have significance for _everyone_ instead of just the one guy I sucked off in the school bathroom when I was fifteen.”

He finished, realised he should probably have thought more about that last sentence before he said it, and added

“Not that I’ve ever blown a guy or anything. I’m straight.”

Doctor Boswjick blinked a few times, and for a second Craig could have kicked himself because there was no way in _hell_ she wasn’t going to write that Freudian disaster down on paper. Much to his shock though, after about five seconds of processing, the doctor sighed and set her notebook down on the table between them. The pen rolled off, onto the bare wood, and Craig’s eyes flickered nervously between it and the clock on the wall, which told him he was only fifteen minutes into their meeting. The way she was looking at him made a lump rise in his throat.

“Do you think your family and friends would miss you?”

“I hope.”

“You hope?”

“I mean, I’d be a little bit pissed if they didn’t.”

The doctor gave him a small smile, and cocked her head questioningly to the side.

“Don’t you think it’s a little bit selfish for you to want people to care about you, if you don’t also care about them?”

It was funny, Craig had never thought of it that way before.

  

...

 

It had been a rare day at South Park high school, not just because one of the labs had had a minor fire in the morning, or because the cafeteria was serving pizza _and_ chocolate cake for lunch today, but because Craig found by the end that he didn’t entirely hate it.

They lingered in the carpark after classes, Craig and Token and Jimmy and Clyde, sitting on the hood of Token’s car and shooting the shit because it was already Friday evening, and none of them wanted to go home. Craig had Token’s book report on his knee, ignoring the A in the corner and making frantic notes because his own report was already a week overdue. In the background, he was listening to Jimmy talking, saying something about some job he was starting at the ice-cream stand at the mall, and Craig thought fleetingly that perhaps, if he was different to the way he was now, he would be at an age where he ought to look for work as well.

The idea of having a job, and being a functional member of society, was alien and unsettling. He shook it off, in order to focus more intently on Token’s summary of _The Catcher in the Rye,_ blotting out the sound of scooters starting and chatting students all around him, passing out of the carpark and meeting up with friends for the walk home. He was almost half way when he thought he heard Clyde swearing, and when he looked up he saw why.

Across the carpark, Bebe was approaching, and Clyde made haste to empty the can of Monster energy drink he was drinking onto the tarmac, tossing it to Token who hid it neatly because Bebe had informed him not two weeks ago that he needed to cut down on caffeinated soda if he ever wanted to lose weight.

Craig thinned his lips, and drew his breath inside him deeply, because at Bebe’s side carrying textbooks and a Nike gym bag Tweek was walking. His long legs always made him look ungraceful, but he moved with an elegance that compensated in the strangest way.

Goddamnit.

He turned his face back down, and tried to concentrate on the book report in front of him. He had a sinking feeling his day was about to go downhill suddenly. He sucked his teeth and wrote a short note about phonies. He spelt it wrong, and crossed it out, and he tried to remember the correct way to spell the word but found that by this point he was too distracted.

He groaned quietly in frustration, and looked up again. When he did he found that Tweek and Bebe were there, upon him, making conversation with his friends.

“Hey guys.” Clyde greeted the pair of them animatedly, sliding off the hood of the car and alarming Tweek, who had raised his hand politely in salutation. One of Clyde’s chubby arms slung around his too-high shoulder, his other arm lifting to embrace his girlfriend, and Craig looked on in second hand embarrassment as he pulled the pair of them into an awkward tri-directional hug. Tweek looked uncomfortable, eyes flicking pleadingly between Token, and Jimmy, and then finally lighting on Craig, as he patted Clyde uneasily on the back and tried without causing a fuss to pull himself away.

Bebe, however, was not so polite. Craig watched her roll her eyes, and he knew as she did it that she could see Clyde’s guilt. He had always been too loud and too friendly when he was hiding something. Clyde Donovan was easily the world’s most abysmal liar.

“Have you been drinking that soda again?” she asked, and Clyde released them both from his grip with a nervous laugh.

“What? No way! I respect you too much, babe.” He turned, to return to facing Token and Jimmy and Craig, and pulled her snugly against his side. She allowed this, albeit reluctantly, and Craig returned his attention to his notes with a furrow of unease between his brows.

Why had Tweek become so prominent in his life lately? They had spent so long apart, distant in a way that meant there were times that Craig could have forgotten he existed, that Craig was really starting to notice he was making a comeback now. Surely there had been a period in his life where Tweek had gone away? Surely this distance between them had been more than just a wilful illusion? Craig couldn’t really remember, but he knew that up until about two months ago he hadn’t really _thought_ about Tweek so much. What had brought all of this awareness to him now?

Whether it was increased proximity, or increased attention being paid to his actions, Tweek was creeping back into Craig’s life like an intrusive weed, creeping over Craig’s fragile headspace and bringing back bouts of memory, of forgotten emotions and nostalgia blended together into a bitter, tearful taste at the back of Craig’s mouth. The sound of that voice. The familiar-unfamiliar way he carried himself now, like a stranger yet fundamentally unchanged, all made Craig feel like a twelve year old child again. And as someone who tried to distance himself from his childhood days as much as possible, this was certianly less than ideal. Some part of Craig wondered if Tweek was doing this on purpose, as some kind of revenge, but no. That was ridiculous.

The boy had no way of knowing how he was affecting Craig inside. And he didn’t have a genuinely nasty bone in his body besides.

Craig felt a flush creeping up his cheeks for even thinking something so suspicious of the person he used to deeply trust. It said more about himself than it did about Tweek, didn’t it? That kind of question reminded Craig vaguely of doctor Boswjick. His stomach turned over in disgust when he realised that whatever she was doing fiddling around in his brain, she was getting to him.

Goddamn her.

Craig could have gone his whole life without questioning his thoughts and behaviours once, and maybe he would have been slightly less miserable for it. Operative term, of course, being ‘slightly’.

Craig drew a deep breath and looked up from his work when he heard Token talking. By the sounds of things he was trying to get Bebe to engage with him in talk about Wendy – a subject which seemed to be his recent favourite.

“If you come hiking this weekend with Clyde and me, maybe you should invite Wendy with you?”

Craig was a little offended that _he_ hadn’t been invited on a hike anywhere, but not offended enough to miss the way Bebe executed a perfectly practiced and pointedly intentional sigh.

“No way. Wendy has a big date this weekend.”

“Oh what?! No way?! With who?”

Bebe’s lips curled into a smile, her eyes flicking conspirationally to her side and locking with Tweek’s just for a split second. Tweek looked guilty, like he was struggling to maintain a straight face, and Craig had played footsies under the table with him enough times to know that that expression meant he and his companion knew something no-one else did.

This told Craig two very important things in quick succession. The first being that Wendy was interested in setting up an arrangement with Token, and had enlisted Bebe and Tweek in the oldest trick in the book to make that happen – the old fashioned classic ‘hard to get’.

The other thing this told him was significantly more upsetting. And the fact it upset him only served to upset him even further. The pink in his cheeks, and the small turns at the corners of his lips, made it clear that the person Wendy would be spending an evening with this weekend was Tweek.

Jesus! Had he suddenly become some kind of a heartache?

Craig asked himself this question facetiously, because by know he had realised it was probably true. Tweek tweak, the awkward, frazzled little boy who used to panic if he made eye contact with strange girls in public, was hot property.

A long forgotten, almost primal sense of possession swept over him. He could have humiliated himself quite easily, if Bebe hadn’t broken the spell of the secret the three of them knew by saying it all out loud.

“With this one. It took him five years but he finally got the balls to ask her out.”

She nudged Tweek lightly, and he looked appropriately sheepish. Craig felt like if he was to stand up, his guts would drop out.

“Whaaaat?!” Clyde was visibly excited by this news. Token looked like he had just been slapped in the face. He fell for the ruse, hook line and sinker, the unrelenting _need_ to hook up with Wendy Testaburger seared into his mind like a brand. Craig could have admired the elegance of the play, if it hadn’t made him so nauseous.

“No way! You managed to get with Wendy?”

“Uh... yes. Kind of. I mean.... Uh huh.”

He pushed his hair off his face awkwardly, staring at Clyde’s hand uncomprehending for a few seconds longer than he should have when Clyde offered him a high five. Token looked at Clyde like he was a traitor, and in the background Craig could sense jimmy taking it all in so he could roast Token about it later.

“Nice!”

Tweek smiled tightly as he returned the high five, and as soon as he did so he started ushering the pair of them towards his shitty corolla, parked next to Token’s car in the school lot.

“Come grab some pizza with me and B Tweek,” He insisted. “I gotta hear all about it.”

“Uh... no. No thank you.”

The poor boy looked like he had bitten off far more than he could chew. Craig watched him glance around, eyes lighting on everyone in the immediate vicinity for comfort and finally coming to rest on Craig, whose heart stopped for a split second.

“What? Come on! It’ll be fun.”

“I have work this afternoon,” He insisted. “My Mom needs help at the coffee shop...”

“Well at least let me drive you there?”

Tweek, it seemed, had had enough. Craig wondered how willing he had been to go along with all of this in the first place, and felt a pang of soreness when he realised he was no longer in a position to ask him. To make sure everything in Tweek town, surrounded by pretty girls and subject to their whims, was okay.

“No. I’m fine. I have to drive Dads car home, so it’s okay.”

Tweek pulled a set of keys out of his pocket, the keychain boasting a miniature croissant, and jingled them right in Clyde’s face. Craig couldn’t believe his eyes.

“They let you have a car?!” he heard himself exclaiming, before he could help it.

Everyone immediately fell silent. Every eye in the group swivelled to him as though somehow, in the chaos of the conversation, they had forgotten he existed until right now. Tweek looked the most startled of them all.

Craig had long enough to be embarrassed, before suddenly, almost against his expectations, Tweek started laughing.

He laughed and he laughed, and Craig had never felt like so much of a tool in his life.

“You know what,” he said, between chuckles that made Craig want to lie down on the tarmac and die. “That’s a good point. I was surprised too.”

And two hundred and twenty five million kilometres away, the deserted planet Mars beckoned to him.  


	5. GLASS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i may make minor revisions in this chapter in future, you have been warned.

Craig pushed his desk chair into the spot next to his window, and after ensuring his blanket was securely draped over him he dropped down into it, setting his cup of milk and boiling water down on the windowsill. The hot steam coiled from the mouth of the mug, wetting the window with condensation that glittered in the blue-orange glow of the dawn.

It had been a sleepless night.

Craig didn’t remember dreaming, but supposed that between bouts of tossing and turning, and drifting in and out of his conscious state, he must have. Now he had woken, he felt strangely light headed. As though something in his brain had just been re-arranged, and although not a single thing about him had changed he felt he was nothing like he had been the night before.

Craig’s eyes rested on the drink on his windowsill, momentarily lost in the mystical, glittering shapes wrought by the steam on the glass. Milk and hot water, he thought, a flavourless thing. The only hot beverage he could abide anymore. Wasn’t that a shame? Things like coffee or hot chocolate made him feel nauseous, and he had never really been a fan of tea in the first place.

Craig sighed, and let his eyes track to the familiar horizon line. The second floor of his parent’s house, while offering a rather mundane view of the street outside, also provided quite a handsome view of the rocky mountain ranged that limned the town. On clear cold mornings like today, when the last of night was ebbing away from the blinding light of the sun and the clouds took on a bright yellow white intensity, the view was actually sort of beautiful. Craig wondered how many mornings he had not noticed, either sleeping or otherwise indifferent to the world outside. It seemed like he had wasted a lifetime of chances to see something moving every day.

Craig reached out to swipe his finger through the condensation on the window glass. Far away, he could hear birds waking from their roosts in the evergreens, and a strange tingling sensation sizzled up his back and brought a small lump to the back of his throat. He swallowed it down, fingertip pressing flat against the window glass, absorbing all the sensation of wetness and of cold he could identify.

For a brief moment, Craig found his mind completely blank and completely still, like the fragile silence at first light in the dawn. A warm breath escaped him, and then his hand started moving as if possessed by an alien will, forming shapes which didn’t register as familiar until after he had already traced them.

_YT4CT_

He sat back and looked at this script for a moment, studying it as if it was a code he didn’t quite comprehend. He might have sat there in contemplation even longer, if without warning the sound of his sister’s alarm next door didn’t startle him.

Craig swore, his voice drowned out by the vulgar sound of bells at six forty five am. He threw out his hand in annoyance, suddenly embarrassed and wishing he hadn’t allowed himself to do that, and swiping through the letters he hoped they would be erased from history and from his recollection. Or vice versa. Whichever came first would be okay.

“Fuck You Ruby!” he yelled through his wall, standing up and dragging his blanket and chair back to his desk. His hot drink remained on the windowsill, untouched and long since forgotten. “Turn your alarm off already!”

“Fuck you Craig!” her voice was muffled through their common wall, but she shut it off eventually and Craig was glad. He dropped back into his seat at his desk and tried to return himself to the state of peaceful silence he had occupied not one minute before. It seemed impossible now though – all that rearranging in his brain had been agitated by the shock and anger of being interrupted, and a slow hot ache was starting to spread in its wake. He was all jumbled, and all startled, and suddenly he found himself quite exhausted. Chewing on the inside of his cheek, he groped for his phone, and found it under a stack of papers related to the homework he had been attempting the night before.

One new message.

His heart sunk when he saw he had a notification. It was from Token.

He was just about to dismiss the message and crawl back to bed, when suddenly from the chaos of his mind a single thought stopped him.

_Don’t you think it’s a little bit selfish for you to want people to care about you, if you don’t also care about them?_

Craig bit his lip, hesitating longer than he had ever hesitated over a text message before. Craig did care about Token, right? He had to. There _must_ be a reason the two of them were friends in the first place?

Craig tried to remember, but all he could come up with was how hard and fast Token had fallen for Wendy’s plot to make him jealous. How when they were at middle school Token always used to bring bottles of Coke to school for him and Craig and Jimmy and Clyde. How he always wore socks which matched his shirts and sweaters, and Craig thought it was stupid but really, in a way, it was sort of charming. _Token_ was charming. A guy who knew how to act like an adult, but was always hanging around when it was time to have fun, and who was Craig kidding? Token was a great friend. Craig didn’t know what kind of a life he would have without him.

Probably one that was exactly the same, except empty somehow. Slightly lonely. The group vibe wouldn’t be the same without him there to keep them in the right.

Craig relented. He sagged a little at his shoulders, and unlocked his phone. The message said

_Hey dude. Me and Clyde were just wondering... are you alright? Text me sometime this weekend and the four of us can hang out._

Craig text back

_Im fine. Just figuring a few things out._

He ignored the part about the weekend coming, however. He wasn’t sure whether or not he was willing to make such a commitment at this time.

 

...

 

_The door behind the auditorium opened onto the carpark, and it was at the top of the small flight of stairs there that Craig waited, with his books held self-consciously between the rest of the world and his chest. Clyde was late, but when Craig checked his phone he found no explanation in the form of a text. He considered sending out a message asking where he was, but remembered he hadn’t paid his phone bill yet this month – he would have to buy some credit on his way home this afternoon._

_Craig tucked his phone into his pocket and leaned against the rail of the stairs. Across the carpark, he could hear excited voices shouting, the drama club painting sets for their end of year production. To the east, where the small woodland area that backed the football field met the edge of school property, the warm wind of late spring rustled leaves and excited the birdlife. A distant chorus of chattering and tweeting had the aftertaste of the summer which was fast approaching._

_Craig looked down at his shoes, at the slightly stained canvas and battered laces, and asked himself why he still hadn’t thrown these things out. They were easily at least four years old. He was halfway through telling himself that he would need to buy some new ones, and maybe he would need to petition his father to organise it, when the door to the back of the auditorium swung open and a pair of girls Craig recognised but didn’t know by name came bounding out. They carried boxes of glitter and string and neon paint, and smiled and laughed at their chatter before they saw him._

_“Oh,” the girl with big brown eyes and hair in artful spirals paused when she saw him standing there, and for some reason Craig found himself instantly defensive. “It’s you. Are you waiting for someone?”_

_“... Yeah.”_

_She and the girl beside he exchanged meaningful looks, and Craig remembered with an uneasy flip in his guts why it was the two girls were familiar._

_He had hung out with them once, what felt like a lifetime ago. Two of Colette’s friends. She had so many friends. Nowadays it seemed like they were everywhere, but Craig had never noticed even a single one of them before._

_“’Kay.”_

_The spiral haired girl didn’t sound convinced, but after giving him a slow once over, she allowed herself to let it go. He watched them descend the stairs and walk away, the auditorium exit clicking heavily closed behind them, and as he watched them lean closer to exchange words about him Craig felt like he was the world’s most disgusting person. A despicable being. Unadulterated Satan in his earthly form._

_His chest seemed to lock up a fraction. The desire to yell at them that they didn’t know the kind of shit he was going through choked up the passages in his throat. Why was it that he had to be the dick, this time as well? He had to be the dick yet_ again. _He had been the dick when he had broken up with Tweek earlier, and he had been the dick when he had turned Colette’s affection down. Now he was a dick again, every time it seemed to strike him over, whenever he passed a friend of hers in the halls or on the streets, and nobody ever bothered to ask for_ his _side of the story._

_Or maybe that was exactly the kind of self-justifying indignancy that a dick would think._

_He worried his fingers on the edges of his book, his feelings hurt and smarting. His mood felt like it had hit rock bottom, hovering not far from the abyss of angsting that he had hoped getting laid would help him run away from. He closes his eyes and tried to breathe in deeply._

_It’s okay, he told himself half-heartedly. He’s fucked someone. Craig was straight and finally cleansed completely of_ him _._

_But even as he thought it, the small honest voice deep inside himself informed him that sleeping with Colette had only made him feel dirtier an ashamed. At best, it had left him fundamentally and depressingly unchanged._

_He jumped when he heard the auditorium door slam open again beside him._

_This time, the person who leapt out at him was Clyde. And thank god, Clyde was always in a plesant mood to see him._

_“Hey man! How’s it going? Have you seen Bebe I need to give her a little somethin’ somethin’.” He pulled a key out of his pocket – the tag was numbered, which betrayed it as being the second key to Clyde’s locker. The two of them had been dating for three weeks now, and Clyde was apparently desperate to make it serious as soon as possible. Craig nodded stiffly and gestured towards the group of drama students painting sets in the carpark._

_He hadn’t seen her, but it was a reasonably educated guess. If there was a school drama production event occurring, the chances of Bebe being there were ten-to-ten. She had decided, the summer which had preceded this one, that her lifelong dream was to be a famous actress, and Craig wasn’t going to be the one to tell her this was unlikely. Clyde grinned, and gestured for Craig to follow him down the stairs. Dutifully, Craig trailed after him across the carpark, listening to him ramble about something or another while Craig let his mind touch on matters of self-loathing._

_The sets being prepared were for a production of King Lear, although at the time Craig had no way to know it. He followed Clyde past the newspapers spread on the ground, ignoring the sideways looks he was getting from some of the girls, until Clyde spotted Bebe at the back of the group, erecting a staircase concealed by a cardboard cliff and ensuring that the pieces of the cliff were appropriately attached to one another._

_The pair of them approached, and Craig was actually glad to see familiar, non-judgemental Bebe smile at them. She opened her arms for Clyde to embrace her, and he did, and it was a rare and enviable moment of genuine teenaged love that made Craig mime gagging when they broke apart. Bebe huffed, and Clyde pretended not to notice._

_“I brought you this.” He told her, digging around in the pocket of his jeans for the key. Bebe seemed enchanted, and so distracted from her work that behind her the cardboard cliff began slipping, a large segment of the top starting to teeter as though it had every intention to fall._

_“Jesus Bebe! What the hell?!”_

_Craig felt every hair on his body stand on end when, out of nowhere, a familiar voice interrupted the exchange and a familiar face emerged from behind the staircase, splayed hand making to grab and secure the errant cardboard and ensure they the piece stayed in place._

_Tweek had been squatting behind the edifice, a stranger in his wife beater singlet and sneakers, and his sweater tied around the waist, which had grown slimmer and longer since Craig had last talked with him. It seemed like lifetimes ago. Clearly pissed, Tweek waited for Bebe to spin around and re-attach the cardboard with tape, his brow furrowed and his hair pulled back into the start of a stubby ponytail atop his head. He looked so much older now. So different... Craig tried to remember how he had looked that day in the mall, but he couldn’t because Tweek’s forehead was set in a familiar crease, and the back of his singlet was darkened with a small diamond of sweat between his shoulder blades, and when Bebe finished attaching the bit of cliff he relaxed and stepped away to face the three of them. His arm lifted to wipe across his face, and Craig could see his underarms, and the muscles on the side of his chest._

_A rush of something passed through Craig, dizzying and heady and accompanied by the vivid memory of the way his skin smelled behind his ears, the vibration of his voice inside his chest, and the way his fingers felt sinking into the flesh on the back of Craig’s legs. Everything up until that moment seemed unreal, a papery, insubstantial dream. How did Craig get here, so far away from him, and from_ that _? Craig felt like he was still a child, but he was looking at Tweek as if from a distance, peering into his future and the man he would become and seeing that he was handsome, but unfamiliar. Terrifyingly so. He looked like he didn’t belong to Craig any more._

_Their eyes met, for a moment, and Tweek’s eyebrows raised in shock. The colours around him seemed to fade to grey, and all Craig could see was the green of his eyes, the flush on his cheeks, and the smooth pink contours of his lips._

_Craig’s stomach lurched, and he wrenched his eyes away. His breathing was so shallow he felt like it was stopping at the back of his throat. The world seemed to quiver like liquid around him, and numbly he reached for Clyde’s sleeve._

_“I feel sick,” he heard himself say, through his too-tight too-full chest. “I need to go home.”_

_He needed more than that, but wasn’t sure how to express it. He wasn’t even sure what it was._

...

 

The lunchroom had an air of excitement about it that morning, a tingling in the air like the sound of a stand-by appliance running, because everybody there knew it was the last day before the thanksgiving break and it would be a week before any of them were back in this building again. Craig was not sharing his friends enthusiasm – as the group of them sat at one of the hard plastic benches, close to the window but not close enough for there to be a nice view outside, Craig busied himself poking at the Tupperware box of casserole his mother had supplied him with the collapsible fork he had stolen from his sister. It didn’t smell good, and had a strange consistency, Craig found himself relating rather strongly to the goo as he dragged the fork prongs through it and sluggishly, as though it cause it great pain to do so, it moved back into level place. A thick gruel with peas floating in it. Tasting and smelling like it contained large quantities of dirt.

Craig sighed, and looked up from his lunch, to Clyde who had pizza bought with his debit card and Token, who had brought a box of sushi with him for him and Wendy to share.

Wendy was sitting opposite Craig, with her arm looped serenely through Token’s. The expression on her face, silent victory, said without a single sound that she was elated with how things had panned out for her. The ploy to make Token jealous had worked. She was now sitting pretty at the top of the social heap. Her and Token were probably a decent match anyway – they were both smart and very handsome. And Craig didn’t even mind admitting that, although that could just have been because he was too tired to argue or lie to himself.

Wendy was a beautiful woman, with her shining hair and blue eyes and her face, the literal picture of intelligence. Craig felt kind of like a goblin by comparison, and as the group around the table started to discuss plans for the upcoming holiday, Craig slouched in his seat and abandoned his box of casserole. He was having a hard time keeping his eyes from shutting – he had been plagued by uneasy sleep all of last night. He kept having dreams about a summer day, about painting sets and hot breathing and the smell of someone else’s hair. And as he remembered his dreams he thought of the texture of _Wendy’s_ hair, darker than the hair in his dreams and flowing through his fingers as he braced her, and kissed her, and they promised they would never tell anyone about this but Craig had only said that so she would ride him.

Maybe it would have been better if he had been brave enough to actually respond to her pleas for touches. For kisses. For his mouth on her breasts. But then again, his experience with Colette was still haunting him. Even though he thought Wendy wasn’t the ‘type’

_I love you_

He didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

He had lain there, and he had taken it, and afterwards he could feel Wendy’s fury and frustration as he had rolled off of him and the two of them had remained there in silence.

The sex had been bad.

The guilt had been horrible.

The lying on his back in the aftermath had been worse.

Why was it that every time he had bad sex, he ended up on his back and gazing at the ceiling afterwards?

He realised half way through thinking that Wendy Testaburger, the woman who had endured the painfully dull sit on his dick for fifteen minutes before she lost patience, was too good for him anyway, that she was aware of him staring and she was speaking to him.

He sat up straighter in his seat and tried to not look like he had been completely zoned out. Ever since that night they had fucked, Wendy had a particular way of looking at him. It was mostly pitying, and sort of amused, but underneath it all Craig could sense elements of disgust and he wondered if she regretted it as much as he did.

Almost certainly, she did.

“Huh? What?”

She smiled tightly at him, and repeated herself.

“I said, I could set you up on a date with one of the cheer team if you like.”

“Why would I like that?”

Craig was confused as to how this topic had come up. He looked to Jimmy or Clyde for explanation, but of course Jimmy wasn’t there (Fridays were the day the school newspaper met for their weekly shared lunch) and Clyde was too busy making mushy eyes at Bebe to be paying him any mind. Token came in to the rescue.

“We are considering going on a multiple date to a movie or something. If you wanted to come?”

He winked lecherously, out of Wendy’s line of sight. Craig’s skin crawled in response.

“I don’t want,” he said, stirring his fork in his casserole again. “But thanks.”

He looked down before he could see the look of offence on Wendy’s face. He wasn’t finished processing his thoughts on their former intimacies, and in a strange self-conscious way Craig worried that if he met her eye she would be able to see right inside him and know exactly what it was that was on his mind.

He wished he had never fucked her. He wondered if she had let Token know. Craig felt guilty, knowing that if Token found out, he would be furious, but also hurt in the way that one could only be hurt by their close friends. And Craig had made a conscious decision to try harder to care about his friends. Sex was one of those things which ruined friendships, it seemed – this was something Craig had known long before he had ever slept with Wendy. He felt himself flush as he thought of it, the alien act of being close to someone else, and the high pressure emotionally charged exchanges between two bodies navigating the oceans of hormonal change.

It was powerful stuff. Terrifying stuff. Mysterious, magical, shameful, and horrifying. The power of such an act had a tendency to turn Craig cold, and it was _scary_ to find something which could turn even the chilliest, emptiest, hollowest of hearts cold.

He swallowed a lump in his throat and sniffed, the uncomfortable scratching at the back of his nose pressuring him to start crying and drop his face down into his lunch. In the distance, Token said something which must have been funny.

The soft, flowery sound of Wendy laughing made all of Craig’s hairs stand on end.

 

...

 

Craig walked into doctor Boswjick’s office with his jaw set and his fists balled, knowing that if he let himself falter he would never be able to do it, and fearing that if he wasn’t able to do it then he would never be able to feel okay.

This was important. The first important thing Craig had ever recognised in himself. He needed to get to the bottom of this, and that was that.

He had had more dreams last night. Fucked up, homesick dreams that made him gag. More dreams about longing, and about farm houses and summer and the smell of hot drinks, and dreams about lovers meeting on cold starlight evenings, sharing kisses, and breathing deeply into each other’s chests. His head was aching, and his soul was tired so that every part of him felt heavier than lead. Craig had never been more aware of the way that he was a mind, trapped inside a hefty corpse, and he needed to remove the pressure of restlessness and guilt so he could forget again. So he could go back to the way it was.

The psychiatrist seemed startled at first, even alarmed. She stared at him with wide eyes as he jerked off his scarf and gloves, and dropped down in the sofa opposite her with powerful intent.

“Looks like snow today,” she said, her voice betraying her curiosity despite her efforts to remain impartial. Craig grunted, and leaned forward in his seat.

“I have something I want to talk about.” He said, and the words tasted weird and unfamiliar as he said them, “If that’s alright?”

“Of course! The doctor replied, and her whole countenance seemed to brighten. “You are welcome to talk about anything of importance to you, at any time.”

“Today I want to talk about my ex-boyfriend.”

He waited a few seconds, carefully watching her expression as this information landed.

“Your ex-boyfriend?” she repeated, and Craig nodded.

“Yeah. We called him Tweek. Him and I started dating when we were children. But for some reason we stuck it out way into our teens.”

“Did you now?”

Doctor Boswjick raised her eyebrows, and wrote this down. Craig nodded, rubbing his sweating hands on the front of his jeans. He was aware of how fast his heart was beating, and how all his words were coming out in a fast and almost unintelligible, but he couldn’t stop now because now it was out there he felt like he was about to break if he tried to keep it inside. Now it was in front of him, he realised, it was so much bigger and darker and more ominous than it looked from the corner of his eye.

“We broke up because I decided I wanted to start having sex with women. And recently I think I can’t stop thinking about it.”

He simply couldn’t. Not anymore. The memory was always at the back of his mind. In his dreams, and during those periods of silence in the classroom when everyone was working, Craig felt the pressing weight of something on his shoulders and his back, and it was weird to say out loud that maybe it was this. That maybe he was guilty, or maybe he was confused. Or maybe he was feeling left behind and lonely because all around him everyone else was happy and moving on. Everyone else was doing okay but Craig...

Things had only been going downhill for him, since he first started wondering if he would be happier with a pretty girl on his arm.

Was he a selfish and stupid person? Did he _deserve_ to suffer, because he forfeited the only good relationship he had ever really had?

“I see. Is there any reason you’ve been thinking about this a lot lately?”

“I guess. I think it’s because I’ve started to notice he’s spending a lot of time with girls. And when I think about it, it makes me feel like I’m touching something that burns.”

“Like you want to pull yourself away?”

“Exactly.”

She looked thoughtful for a moment, peering into him and pressing the end of her pen to the bottom of her chin.

“Do you spend much time with girls?”

“None at all. I’ve slept with people, but don’t tell my Mom and Dad that or they will kill me. But I’m really not very good at speaking to girls.”

“Maybe you are envious of your ex-boyfriend?”

“No, it’s not like that.”

Craig knew even as he said it what it really was. And he knew as he thought it that he didn’t want to make it real, by saying it out loud.

“... What is it?” Doctor Boswjick asked.

He hesitated, asking himself if he really wanted to admit to this, but when he looked around the room and saw the closed office door, and the familiar bookshelves and picture of the galaxy on the wall, he thought he was going to have to admit to it sometime, in some place. It would probably be best for everyone involved if it was here.

“I’m jealous of him. I feel like he should be mind. I don’t want anyone else to have him but me. And on top of that, I think I’m angry, because if the only sex I’ve ever had with girls has been shitty, then a part of myself doesn’t want _him_ to have good sex either. It feels like that would ruin the times we were together and make him feel about me the same way I felt about him for so long.”

“Which was what?”

Craig shrugged, feeling himself flush as he recalled all the aggressive, bitter things he had tried to force himself to feel.

“Like the time we spent together was an embarrassment. Like I had imagined all of the feelings I had for him over the years we were dating. And I tried so hard to cling to that because I didn’t want to admit that I missed him, and that I thought I had really fucked up by letting him go.”

The doctor let him fall silent, cocking her head slowly and contemplating the way he was starting to pick nervously at his cuticles and nails. In her eyes, he saw a silent bewilderment, disguised by the serenity of professionalism. He had to look away because under her scrutiny, Craig felt even more embarrassed about thinking this than he _ever_ felt about dating Tweek.

“Your relationship with your ex-boyfriend was sexual?” she inquired. Craig shrugged, even though he wanted to shake his head.

“We didn’t... you know. Properly. But we talked about it and did some other stuff. It didn’t feel sexual or anything, 'cause I was never really _attracted_ to him. But we just got along so well, and there were times I just felt _so much_. I didn’t know how to handle or express those feelings. I still don’t.”

“Craig, at the risk of sounding condescending, you need to know that puberty is a very tumultuous time for teenagers and exploring this kind of thing with people is not unusual. Sex with someone can be a huge drain on your physical and emotional wellbeing, particularly when you are in your mid-teens and unsure about what sex or a relationship ought to mean.”

“What _does_ sex mean?”

“I don’t know. What it means for me is probably very different for what it means to you. What do you think it means?”

Craig sighed, slowly becoming aware of all the ways he was exhausted.

“I think it means you’re lonely, and you’re sad, and the only thing that helps is the promise that just for a moment things might be okay.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yeah. I also think it doesn’t help anything. But still I try and do it because somehow, some part of me believes that if I keep trying someday that will change.”

And now this was off his chest, Craig didn’t really have much else to say.


	6. SOLAR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Its been 200 years.
> 
> I said i would inish all my old crappy fics before i start any new ones.

Ruby was scraping her knife over her plate intentionally – she could see the way it was making all of the hairs on Craig’s arms stand on end.

Though it was cold outside, Craig’s grandmas kitchen, converted for one night only to a dining room for eight, was far too hot. The heat pump had been running all day, and the last of the warmth of the oven still hung on the air. Red was looking at him across the table as though she knew something about him that the other members of his family, sat around a large dining table and pulverising mountains of roast turkey and potatoes, did not, and every time his grandma asked him to pass something he had to ask her several times to repeat herself. Not because he was hard of hearing, but because everyone around him was talking far too loud.

“I haven’t spoken to you in a while Craig,”

His uncle reached past him for the turkey, Craig watched his arm extending, noting the way the cuffs of his button shirt were already dirtied by a few stray spatters of gravy. Craig hummed, and sunk his fork discretely into one of the roasted potatoes sitting on his plate.

“Yep.”

“How’s things going for you?”

Craig shrugged, eyes flicking to red to see if she was still watching him. She wasn’t, having become engaged in conversation with Ruby about something stupid. The kind of things girls talked about, Craig wasn’t sure, exactly, what.

“same as always. School and stuff.”

“Have you got a girlfriend?”

Craig’s fork froze, his carefully cut chunk of roast potato hovering a few inches away from his mouth. It was an innocuous question, for sure, but Craig couldn’t help the tide of suspicion that rose in him to hear it.

“A girlfriend?” he repeated, his voice dropping a few decibels to ensure his grandmother, engaged in chatting to his father on the other side, couldn’t hear him.

“Sure. A handsome kid like you must have a girlfriend. That little lady of mine won’t keep me clued in to her social lifestyle, but I’m always keen to gain a little insight if I can get it.”

He grinned, in the way a slightly dim but ultimately well meaning uncle does, and Craig swallowed uncomfortably.

“We kind of hang out in different groups,” he told him, setting his knife and fork gently down. His palms were starting to get sweaty and hot, and he didnt like the feeling of cold metal clasped in them. “I don’t have a girlfriend, but even if I did it wouldn’t be one of Reds friends.”

And as if Red could hear him talking about her, she looked up at him from across the table and frowned, and Craig felt a part of himself wither up and die. Wendy and his cousin were in the same cheer team. Collette and his cousin often hung out together at the mall. Of all the people currently in the room with him, Red was the one who was most likely to know about his private business and Craig found he didnt like that at all.

Craig had never liked thanks giving dinner with his family, anyway. He thought it was an unnecessary inconvenience, as he saw most of them during his daily life, and when he didnt it was usually for a very good reason. Specifically, because he was choosing to avoid confrontation. Or the kind of awkward questions his uncle was subjecting him to now.

“I see...”

Reds father looked at him sceptically, his utensils hovering a few inches off the food on his plate. “You don’t know if my little lady is seeing anyone, do you?”

“I do not.”

Craig skewered a yam on the prongs of his fork, and stuffed it into his mouth to indicate the conversation was closed. Across the table, red said something which made ruby giggle, and his grandmother leaned forward to reach for the gravy boat next to him.

“Craig dearest, pass me the gravy would you?”

She spoke with a quiet, crinkling voice like clean linen, but somehow she managed to be more audible than every other voice in the room. Perhaps it was because of the benevolence which overflowed in the tone of her request.

Craig found himself doing as instructed, the gravy sloshing against the porcelain sides of the boat when he lifted it, and as he moved he felt Ruby’s eyes swivel towards him. The girl had some kind of sixth sense whenever their grandmother was concerned. Perhaps she was more aware than Craig was, of the way that twenty dollar bills found their way into pockets whenever the elderly Marcella Tucker was conversational.

“Here grandma.”

“Thank you dear. Is the food alright?”

“Its fine.” He looked down at the constellation of peas on his plate, and the bright white floret of cauliflower he hadn’t even touched. “I’m not that hungry I guess.”

“Craig has been sick lately grandma,” Ruby interjected. Her voice bellowed into the air and suffocated everyone else’s conversation. Craig’s parents even paused their private discussion in order to peer between their children curiously.

Craig felt his jaw tense in irritation, and his grandmother looked at him curiously with filmy blue eyes.

“That’s unfortunate, dearest. You don’t have to eat it all if you cant manage.”

He finished the whole plate though, just to spite her.

Craig didnt talk to anyone else for the rest of the evening. At east, not until the dishes were washed and the plate packed away, and the clock said ten pm so him and his sister and his mother and father all made their way out to the car to drive home. Craig remained silent for the duration of the ride, looking at the street lamps through the fog his breath left on the window, and ignoring the blue light which glowed in his peripheral when ruby played candy crush on her phone. Not a word escaped him as the car pulled into the drive, and he didnt even make to unbuckle his belt until after the car had stopped moving, and Ruby threw off her belt with a sigh of relief and an announcement – she intended to have a shower, so first dibs on bathroom as soon as everyone got inside.

Craig hadn’t really thought about what he planned to do when he got inside. Maybe a glass of water then crawl into bed? He made to undo his seatbelt, and shuffle across the seat to exit the car behind her, when his father stopped him.

“Craig.”

Thomas tucker thrust his hand through the gap between the two front seats, holding it up in a gesture that said ‘wait’ while Craig’s mother and sister both made their way out of the car.

“Aren’t you coming?” ruby asked him snidely, and his father cut him off before he could answer.

“Craig and I are going to have a little chat.”

Ruby smiled in a way that said she thought he was in big trouble. She wiggled her eyebrows at him, and slammed the car door.

Craig and his father were now alone in the car. Suddenly, Craig was aware of how small the cabin of the vehicle actually was. Beads of sweat sprung up on his palms, and he sat back in his seat stiffly.

“Yeah?”

His voice sounded small and hollow, rattling around in his throat.

“I just wanted to ask you, how’s counselling going?”

Oh boy.

Craig had been right to be suspicious. Every single fibre in his body seemed to shrivel, a dread cutting through him to his bones. On the list of all the people in the world he wanted to talk about this with, his father was somewhere around the bottom.

“Uh. Fine. Counselling is going fine.”

“Just fine?”

“uh huh?”

The silence that hovered on the air between them echoed with the truth – things were not going fine. They were going _something_ , certainly, but they weren’t going ‘fine’. A better word perhaps, would be painfully. A better word, perhaps, would be raw. But whatever word Craig would have chosen, he knew as well as his father it wouldn’t be just ‘fine’. Craig wasn’t sure anything could ever really be fine. He thought, as he sat there looking at his father in the front seat, nothing would ever be fine again.

Thomas sighed, and rubbed the balding patch at his forehead.

“Okay. Is there anything you wanted to talk to me or your mother about?”

“Nope. Not right now.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Because you know, your mother and I. We are here for you.”

“I know that.”

A short staring match ensued, but Craig had the advantage of being in the back seat, facing forward. Thomas had to twist in his seat and crane his neck, to maintain eye contact. Eventually, he sighed and acquiesced.

“Alright Craig. You’re good to go then. Out you get.”

Craig would have liked to catapult himself out of the vehicle by that point, but he figured he would be better to take it slow and act natural. He could feel hot tears at the back of his nose, and a squeezing panicked clutching at the root of his throat. His father pulled the handle, and the door popped open on the drivers side, just as Craig was shimmying out the back. The sound of his breathing, which had become laboured just by the little effort required to move his own weight out of the car, made Craig strangely and irrationally furious.

“I never asked you guys to have me,” he heard himself say, because it seemed like the most hurtful thing he could think of at the time. “It was really fucking selfish of you to do that. I didnt ask to be born.”

Thomas looked at him, frozen in his awkward stance existing the car, as though he wasn’t entirely sure f Craig had said anything. Craig took his silence as an opportunity to stand up straight and slam the door behind him, and the feeling of the latch snapping shit filled him with sweet tingling satisfaction. His heart was racing, his mouth was wet. He felt himself from a distance, as though he was only watching from the outside what was going on.

“I beg your pardon.”

“How do you expect me to talk to you and mom, when its your fault I’m alive in the first place?”

It seemed as though Thomas didnt have anything to ay to that. Craig tensed his jaw, and strode back to the house on legs which felt like they were made of pool noodles. When he got inside, he slammed the front door again, and the shudder of satisfaction came back, albeit not so strongly.

Only the did he exhale and realise he had been holding his breath the whole time.

 

...

 

_The duvet was warm and heavy. Craig lay in his back with his right arm bent awkwardly beneath him, because he was crammed between Tweek  and the wall and the bed was only big enough for a single body of small stature - not suitable for two pubescent boys at all._

_Craig didnt mind, nonetheless. He liked the comforting warmth of Tweek’s skin, and the smell of his shampoo right underneath his nose. He often found himself longing for positive contact with others, more so lately than usual, and Tweek  was the only means he had to experience that. He allowed the other boy to wiggle against him and get comfortable, or as close to comfortable as it was possible to be given the situation, and once this was accomplished he discreetly sidled even closer so their bodies were touching all down their length. From their Shoulders to their hips to their lower legs._

_“This is not as comfortable as I remember.” Tweek  murmured, and Craig smiled into the darkness._

_“It’s the same as last week if you ask me.”_

_“I didnt. But I’ll take your word for it.”_

_Tweek  pulled the duvet up under his chin, and fell silent._

_The week before that even, it had been very much the same. And it had been the week before that too. And the week before that. A far back as Craig could remember they had spent weekends like this, except there had to be some point at which they didnt because Craig knew things hadn’t always been this way. Just like they hadn’t always been too large to share a mattress._

_These things, Craig supposed, just changed so slowly he didnt notice, and it was unsettling to become acutely aware of this for a moment because the key to gradual change was that one didnt notice it. It was like looking in a mirror one day and realising he wasn’t eleven years old, anymore._

_“Craig?”_

_Even Tweek s voice sounded different – scratchier and more inclined to cracking than it had been once upon a time. And Tweek ’s voice had always been scratchy, and cracking._

_“Yah?”_

_Craig tensed and untensed his fingers into a fist. He was starting to loose feeling in his right hand._

_“How much longer do you think we can share a bed like this?”_

_“I dunno. However long. Does it matter?”_

_“Yeah definitely. I think it does. Look at us – you’re way too tall and I’m terrified my parents are going to ask me if....” he trailed off, and Craig found his interest piqued by his tone. Tense and a little uncomfortable, but resolute. Almost like he had been working himself up to raise the topic for some time._

_Craig recalled how briskly he had skirted around Craig’s suggestion that they go to bed early this evening. The telling silences which stole over him when Craig invited himself over in front of their friends, at lunch. Was he embarrassed by him or something? Was he starting to become ashamed that he and Craig lay like this on weekend nights?_

_“If what?”_

_“Well, you know...”_

_Craig didnt. Although he was starting to. And as he made the connection a tingling coldness spread through him – at odds with the sudden flush which burned his cheeks._

_“Just cause we share a bed doesn’t mean...”_

_“Well, yeah, I know that.” Tweek  squirmed uncomfortably, and suddenly Craig wasn’t sure how he felt about having his naked thigh pressing against Craig’s own. His belly lurched, and the hair on his arms prickled. He realised he could smell Tweek s sweat and it definitely didnt smell like he remembered it. It was hovering, alien and not entirely unpleasant, but different to how it was before._

_“But do you think your parents know that as well?”_

_“mmm.. maybe. I’ve never thought about it.”_

_“Sounds like you have.”_

_Tweek  was silent, but his soft breathing seemed to echo between them._

_“I just thought,” he murmured eventually, “that if people thought that about us it might change the way they see us. The way they see...”_

_He hesitated, and Craig felt a cold sensation sliding down his back._

_“... me. I’m afraid it might change the way people see me.”_

_“You think it might change the way people see you, if they think you’re having sex with me?”_

_Tweek  was unpleasantly silent._

_Craig found himself silent too – for the moment, words escaped him. Rather than being comfortable and familiar, he thought suddenly that he felt huge and crapped and trapped on the small single bed._

_Tweek  tried to pick up the conversation again._

_“Its not that. Its not that at all. I cant explain it but I don’t know... you’ve never had sex right? Neither have I. Don’t you think that’s kind of weird considering? I mean, we never even talk about it-“_

_“Do we have to right now?”_

_Tweek  sucked a deep breath in through his nose. Craig could feel his arms quivering, his fingers twisting nervously into the sheets._

_“I dunno Craig. You tell me.”_

_“Well hang on. Tell me something. Why are you bringing this up in the first place?”_

_It seemed like strange timing. Craig was still groping blindly in this new territory, his mind going back to touch on all their interactions from the last week. The last month. The last lifetime, in an effort to pinpoint the place where this thought got fixed in Tweek s head. He couldn’t, and when Tweek  answered he understood that that wasn’t a failure on his part, so much as a simple fact – he would never know what it was like to be Tweek  Tweak. His boyfriend would always live a separate life to him – and only he would know his innermost thoughts. His experiences. His mysteries._

_“You know how it is when you jerk off, right?”_

_Craig didnt._

_He sat up, the movement pulling up the sheets and letting the cool air of the night time flow between them. He was too big for the small single bed, he thought he could deny it no longer. But at the same tome he was far too small to be having this conversation. about how the warmth of his own hand on his belly was a comfort, but a terror – like standing on the edge of a precipice looking into a fall._

_“Of course I do,” he told him, feeling his face burning as he lied. “Everyone does. You know Clyde and Cartman talk about stuff like that all the time.”_

_“Its different though Craig! Joking about it, and trying it for the first time.”_

_Craig shrugged._

_”Is it?”_

_“Yes! Very. Don’t you think its kind of weird, the way that people joke about something as private as that?”_

_“Mmm. I’ve never really thought about it that way before.”_

_Craig found his left hand creeping over his right side shoulder. The touch was comforting. Protective. The cotton of his sleeping shirt was warm and soft under his palm._

_“Well, The reason I’m worried about us sleeping together, is because I’m worried people will get ideas about how we are together. You and I. Being close to one another, and what its like...”_

_“I don’t understand.”_

_“Well, I guess I’m having trouble explaining it.”_

_“I guess you are.”_

_Tweek  didnt try to elaborate further. Craig tried very hard to understand what he meant. What was it like to be close to Tweek , anyway? How were they together, sleeping side by side, skin on skin throughout the night? And what would it be like? To have sex with him?_

_Craig felt his heart do a strange thing in his chest. He swallowed the sensation, and let himself lie back down._

_“I lied,” he herd himself telling him, quietly. His voice was carried barely on his breathing. “I’ve actually never... you know. I mean... of course I’ve tried.”_

_For a moment, he thought Tweek  hadn’t heard him._

_“Oh.” Came the response after a while. “alright.”_

_It was hardly more reassuring than a silence._

_Craig turned his back on his bed mate, rolling awkwardly over onto his side. He swore to himself silently, that he would sleep apart from Tweek  in future. This night with their ankles touching beneath the sheets would be the very last time._

_“We could do it together?”_

_Craig almost didnt hear him speaking. He almost didnt hear him, or feel Tweek s hand press gently against the small of his back._

_“As long as you don’t... you know. Tell anyone. We can do it together this evening and I can show you how.”_

_..._

Craig held the mug in both hands, the warmth bleeding through the ceramic and warming his skin in a way which made him nostalgic for something, but he wasn’t exactly certain of what. Doctor Boswjick sat opposite him and spooned sugar into her cup of milky tea. The sound the teaspoon made as it clicked the edge of the mug made the hair on the nape of Craig’s neck stand on end.

“I spoke to your parents yesterday, Craig. We usually check in with the parents of patients every few weeks so we can see if they have noticed any improvements.”

Craig’s eyes followed her spoon as she sat it down on the table between them.

“And have they?”

His voice betrayed the exact degree to which he was interested in that information, which was not at all.

“Well, yes and no. Your Dad mentioned something about you opening up a little the other day. Thanksgiving, he said it was. Do you remember that?”

Craig remembered telling his uncle through gritted teeth, about how he was passing in school and planning to apply for college soon even though really, he was not. He remembered arguing with ruby. And he remembered almost wigging out on his father in the car when they arrived home.

“I do not.”

“Well, you know he said he was glad you were able to open up to him. But expressed concerns that you might be experiencing suicidal ideation. You know what that is?”

“I want to kill myself?”

“Something like that. But then, maybe the feeling you are having is nowhere near that explicit? I think you’re old enough by now Craig, to know the ins and outs of what happens in your own head.” She sipped her tea daintily, and sat it back down on the table. “So what do you think? If you are having anything which might possibly be considered suicidal ideation, it may be helpful for us to discuss it. Don’t you think?

Craig did think. He thought about it for all of two seconds, before he replied.

“I promise you, I’m not going to go home and top myself. You should know by now doctor B, I’m not that kind of guy.”

Even as he said it, though, Craig’s fingers tightened on the mug and a lump rose up to the back of his throat. He felt his mind teetering dangerously close to the edge of his self control, tempted by the opportunity to entertain the thought of ending his life. He wondered, just for a moment, if he would be capable of that, but found that in even approaching the idea he felt very sick. Perhaps, the most disturbing aspect was the knowledge which came over him, deep and true and _understanding_ that if he so desired, the ability to send himself hurtling of this mortal coil was very much his.

He had never really considered that idea, before. Or maybe he had, in the moments after sleep, but before waking. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to think about it.

“Not what kind of guy?”

“The guy to do something. The kind to do anything. I don’t really know how to explain it, its not so much that is wish that I could die. Its more a matter of wishing I was never even born in the first place.”

Doctor Boswjik nodded, and she reached to the side table beside her to secure her notebook and pen. Craig watched her write something down. A prescription? Some kind of diagnosis for his concern?

“So you mean to say, that you feel like this course of action would be too much effort?”

“Well, yeah. I guess it would. Is he like... upset about me blaming him for having me or something?”

“I think he is. But wouldn’t you be upset, too? He loves you Craig, and your mother. They both do.”

Craig and his therapist both receded into an uneasy silence. Craig could feel the thought of his parents love creeping over his skin in a strange, clammy kind of way. A short of breath kind of way. A way which made his chest feel more constricted than it really was. He cleared his throat, and brought his hot drink to his lips for the first time.

The doctor sighed, and asked Craig what else he had been doing for his first week of the holidays.

“Nothing much,” came the reply. His milk and hot water was lukewarm, and the taste was milky and sickly and pleasant. He licked his lips, and downed the rest of the cup in one go. Immediately afterwards, he felt a little sick.

“Nothing much like what? Family stuff? Sleeping? Spending time with friends?”

Craig didnt know how to tell her he had spent most of the time lying around in his room doing nothing. Whenever he wasn’t dozing, he was ruminating, and sometimes between bouts of nothing, he would eat.

“Oh, you know. Thinking mostly.”

“About what?”

Craig almost told her what he had really been thinking about. About how unfortunate and unlucky he was, that of all the infinitesimal chances he had to exist, all of his numbers had been called in a perfect line and he was alive.

“Like I said, nothing really.”

He looked into his cup, and the half-moon of milky beverage at the bottom.

“D’you think it’d be okay if I had another drink?”

 

...

 

The first day back, and Craig had made it through the first two classes okay. His eyes were dry and his head was sore, but not because he had been up all night feeling miserable. He had spent the last 48 hours playing video games with Clyde- another act inspired by his new ‘appreciate your friends’ policy. He had come very close to actually enjoying himself at one or two points in that time.

It was after lunch, in  mathematics, when everything started to fall to pieces again.

Craig sat down, and took his books out. Craig had always enjoyed mathematics, he was naturally good at numbers and graphs and entering things into calculators, and mathematics was an opportunity to do all three. Nonetheless, he was behind everyone else in his class by now, and he was even entertaining the option of talking to his teacher afterwards in an effort to catch up.

Half way through his work though, drawing locaii around a series of points, Craig felt his mind start to wander. And as it wandered, he found it going to unwelcome places.

He set down his pen and stretched his arms up, above his head. It was the first time he had stretched in months and he could feel it, his shoulders aching dully.

He slumped back in his chair, and gazing over his desk mates shoulder, he saw that Jimmy was two questions behind him. The silent, buzzing business of the classroom was unsettling. He blinked, and using the heals of his hands he rubbed his eyes. Blooms of shadows and colours spread across his vision when he brought them down.

He was aware of his legs and fingertips feeling numb, and he wondered briefly how much longer it would be before he could go home and sleep some. Just a little. Even just an hour of resting time.

“Say, Craig?”

“Mm?”

Craig pulled his eyes away from what he was looking at – the static analogue clock on the wall of the classroom, and met Jimmy’s eyes. Eye contact was a forgotten intimacy. He was surprised to find himself looking at someone properly for the first time in a long, long while.

“What did you get for question three?”

Craig slid jimmy his paper, and turned his gaze away to the clock again. However, he found himself caught on something half way there. Something glinting, something golden. Something which was utterly blinding, in the dull environment around them.

The midday light was catching something as it fell through the classroom windows – the brightest light of the last sunny days of November, reflecting off snow and magnified by the freshly squeegeed glass that protected them from outside.

He thought it was a watch at first, winking at him from two rows forward, one row to the left at the front of the classroom.

It wasn’t.

It was a hairpiece. Obviously borrowed. Craig recognised it as belonging to one of Bebe’s friends – the large golden dragonfly pinned back pale blonde bangs, securing it loosely at the back of a head Craig could see only in partial profile. The person wearing it was not aware of him looking, deeply invested in the calculator and worksheet in front of him.

The teacher strode down the aisle of the desks, and obscured Craig’s few for a moment. It was like the sun was being eclipsed, and once he was gone the golden light was back. Craig was squinting. The object was blinding.

Surely the teacher would have noticed as he passed by? Craig expected him to come back to the right side of the room and draw the curtains, but she didnt. Instead, she leaned carefully over the shoulder of one of his classmates, and nodded approvingly.

She returned to the front of the room, and sat at her desk.

The person wearing the dragonfly hairpin adjusted his position in his seat, and pushed a thick hank of hair over his shoulder. This revealed the shape of a familiar nose and cheek.

Craig bit down softly on his bottom lip.

“Thanks Craig.”

Jimmy snapped him out of his focus, and coming back to himself came with a wave of nausea – the kind of light headedness that happens when one hasn’t slept for too many hours. He was getting more tired by the minute. How was it possible, that he was still only half way through the day?

“Oh? Yeah man. No problem.”

He blinked, looking down at his half-done worksheet. All around him, the sound of twenty other people writing. The hum of the heat pumps at the back of the classrooms. Sweat was breaking out on his back, and under his arms, and on the palms of his hands.

He looked back to the person sitting two rows in front of him. Studied the square lines of his shoulders, described by green plaid flannel. Craig liked him best in green plaid flannel – it reminded him of the shirts he used to wear, when they were younger.

What felt like a hundred thousand million years ago.

With an elbow on the desk in front of him, Craig brought his chin to rest in his hand.

The sun had inched incrementally over, no longer catching the wings of the golden insect on Tweek s head but instead throwing the highlights and lowlights in his hair in sharp relief. What was it about Tweek in the sun., Craig wondered, that always managed to leave him breathless. Was it the transparency of his skin that made him so enchanting? The slant of his neck and the fall of his soft blond hair?

The memory of Tweek s scent washed over him, as the young man in front made to reach down into his backpack. Craig didnt see what he retrieved (an eraser?) but he did see the way Tweek shifted the weight in his seat, the s line of his shoulder and hip in his seat. His stomach knotted, and he felt his insides tugging. Like he wanted something. Like the moments just before he slipped to sleep, and then was jerked back to consciousness by thoughts of falling.

Craig sat up right suddenly, as though he has been slapped. Everything was too bright, too real, too silent. The golden syrupy warmth seemed to drip of everything, leaving stark white walls and cold reality.

He realised as he stared straight forwards that the legs of his chair scraping the ground had broken the silence. Jimmy was watching him in wide eyed disbelief. At the front of the room the teacher was frowning. And Tweek too, two rows forward and one row left, had turned to peer at him curiously at the back of the room.

The pressure in his head, the ache that lack of sleep had left settled upon him, became overwhelming, it pressed forwards, filling all the cavities and empty spaces in his skull. Without any control, Craig found himself shivering, the pressure inside his head leaking from his tear ducts, starting to trickle slowly down his cheeks.

He stood up and swept all his things into his satchel. The desk chair scraped the ground again. He didnt give a fuck.

“I have to go,” he managed, somehow.

He was out the door before anyone could stop him.

By the time he reached the boys bathroom down the corridor, waterfalls of tears were falling from his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> YEAH!!! I am pumped to be starting a new Creek story. awww yis. hopefully this wont take me a WHOLE YEAR to finish.
> 
> maybe.
> 
> UPDATE 29/12/2015: WOW okay so like two days ago i amended and re-uploaded a section of the first chapter because i noticed a few errors in it that were annoying the hell out of me, but like some kind of a fool i deleted the fourth segment of the chapter!!! So i stuck that back in now, im sorry to thoose of you who may have missed it earlier. Im so sorry.
> 
> Its kind of important to the plot, thematically speaking, so i will probably apologise again when i post chapter two so those who may have missed it can go back and get caught up.


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